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As President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order in 2020 to retaliate against online services that fact-checked him, a team within the Department of Justice (DOJ) was finalizing a proposal to substantially weaken a key law that protects internet users’ speech.
Documents released to EFF as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit reveal that the DOJ officials—a self-described “Tiger Team”—were caught off guard by Trump’s retaliatory effort, which was aimed at the same online social services they wanted to regulate further by amending 47 U.S.C. § 230 (Section 230).
Section 230 protects users’ online speech by protecting the online intermediaries we all rely on to communicate on blogs, social media platforms, and educational and cultural platforms like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. Section 230 embodies that principle that we should all be responsible for our own actions and statements online, but generally not those of others. The law prevents most civil suits against users or services that are based on what others say.
The correspondence among DOJ officials shows that the group delayed unveiling the agency’s official plans to amend Section 230 in light of Trump’s executive order, which was challenged on First Amendment grounds and later rescinded by President Joe Biden. EFF represented the groups who challenged Trump’s Executive Order and filed two FOIA suits for records about the administration’s implementation of the order.
In the most recent FOIA case, the DOJ has been slowly releasing records detailing its work to propose amendments to Section 230, which predated Trump’s Executive Order. The DOJ This article has been indexed from Deeplinks
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