Trump’s FCC Chairman nominee Brendan Carr has his work cut out for him, explained a top Heritage Foundation researcher.
In a recent interview with Fox News’s America’s Newsroom, Carr said that free speech will be one of his “top issues” as he leads the FCC during the upcoming administration and seeks to “restore American’s First Amendment rights.” On Sunday, Jake Denton, a research associate for Heritage Foundation’s Tech Policy Institute, discussed how Carr can best address rampant censorship on Fox News Live with host Eric Shawn.
Shawn posed the question: “What kind of actions do you think Carr can take?”
Denton responded, “There’s no shortage of tools in his tool chest.” He referred to the potential for reforms to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which shields online platforms from being sued for hosting user-generated content and allows them to in good faith remove certain obscene content. Denton argued that Carr could implement a “stricter reading of the law” noting that so far “it’s given [Big Tech] companies far too expansive of a liability shield.”
The tech researcher referred to a recent letter Carr sent to social media companies in which the FCC commissioner pointed out that “the law is only supposed to apply when these companies operate in good faith. Denton added, “Obviously if anyone has logged into social media we know the content moderation strategy is not done in good faith, it targets conservatives.”
Denton also noted that “Commissioner Carr has said he is a big proponent of algorithmic transparency, publishing open source algorithms so the American people know exactly how certain types of content reach their feed.” He went on to praise Elon Musk for releasing the X algorithm publicly but also acknowledged that there is a lot of work to be done in terms of algorithmic transparency.. “X has been a trailblazer in this, but Instagram, TikTok, these other platforms up with a black box meaning we have no idea how certain pieces of information reach the user and that’s just unacceptable,” Denton stated.
When asked whether there should be any restrictions, Denton advocated for a constitutional standard of free speech. . “At the end of the day, illegal content shouldn’t be permitted on these social media platforms but these tech companies in Silicon Valley have essentially been deputized by themselves to regulate public conversations around politics and other things of that nature,” he said. They have no business weighing in on electoral matters and these types of things but they view themselves as information police, and that has to end.”
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