Brill Battles Bots To Rescue Truth

Alfred A. Knopf

Villains abound in Steven Brill’s new call to arms to rescue truth from internet disinformation agents and ​“pink slime” peddlers. My favorite villain is a piece of legislation.

A portion of a piece of legislation, actually: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

Section 230 shields operators of web-based platforms from libel suits based on posts they publish from the public. Inserted into the law with bipartisan support and little notice at the time, Section 230 created the means by which creeps and con artists have gradually taken over the internet and threatened our ability to learn and share facts and operate a democracy based on civility and transparency.

At the time the measure made sense. There was no Facebook or Instagram or Twitter then. People weren’t glued to screens all day digesting a continuous stream of instantaneous comments and pictures and photos published from around the world designed to advance the most destructive content. Section 230 removed a quirk in the law that had made it harder at the time for operators of emerging platforms like AOL to try to screen out hateful or malicious lies. It sought to allow a new ​“public square” to emerge that promised bottom-up democracy.

But, as Brill delineates in The Death of Truth, Section 230 created a monster: Companies whose very business models rely on algorithms that ram as much hyperbolic and hurtful and vicious content as fast as possible to as many people as possible. Thanks to Section 230, they can’t be sued for falsely telling millions of people that, say, Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked as part of a tryst with a homosexual prostitute, bleach can cure Covid, or a mother and her daughter tallying votes in Georgia were passing around thumb drives like ​“crack vials” with fake data to steal an election through fraud.

Section 230 is fentanyl enabling the new publishing barons (AKA social media companies) to avoid accountability or checks on their power and profit. News organizations can be sued for publishing that stuff. (See: Fox News & Dominion.) The world’s biggest publishers — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram — cannot be sued or suffer harm for publishing that stuff to far more people thanks to Section 230. In fact, they enrich themselves.

Small local news organizations (like this one) can be sued for recklessly ruining people’s lives through libelous posts. The world’s biggest publishers can’t. They and ​“pink slime” news sites set up by foreign governments or product hustlers to mimic real local news sites reap more money by making those posts viral and collecting revenue through faceless algorithmic ​“programmatic advertising” often paid for by mainstream corporations that would be horrified to see where their messages end up.

Even internet reformers concerned about this stuff have argued that we still need Section 230 or otherwise risk losing the ​“public square” in which all voices get to be heard.

Brill notes how the flood of lies and disinformation in fact crowds any hopes for real discussion in a civic commons. Scale turns out to be not a feature, but a bug. In the first part of The Death of Truth, Brill identifies ​“the ultimate issue related to the platforms’ business model”: ​“Why did they have to post twenty-five hundred videos a minute? Why did Facebook have to allow more than a billion posts a day?”

“If we trust little or nothing because we can’t tell the snake oil from the facts, everything breaks down. We cannot have a democracy. Ultimately, we cannot expect a civil society,” Brill writes. ​“But if we understand how truth has been so eviscerated, we can see how to restore it.”

Brill — who earlier in his life dragged the American justice system into a new era of transparency by creating Court TV and the American Lawyer legal newspapers — has dedicated this stage of his career to exposing and fixing this information mess. He started an organization called NewsGuard to carry out the work day to day. He based his new book in part on the extensive research NewsGuard has done. An old-school reporter at heart, Brill is banking on an old-school book to help build public support for a digital menace.

The book identifies plenty of human villains, including Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s network of sites and bots spreading fake stories to try to rip American civil society apart. (Brill himself became a target of those fake stories, leading to death threats and the need for round-the-clock security for his family, after NewsGuard revealed a Russia-based American fugitive’s leading role in the industry.) There are the people behind RT and affiliated sites, Alex Jones, organizations on both the left and right hiding propaganda behind locally-branded pink slime sites.

But Section 230 is the first villain named and explored in depth in the book. I would argue it’s the most useful: It represents the villain who is perhaps the simplest and most effective to take down.

So when Brill started laying out his agenda for fighting back in the book’s final chapter, I was surprised to find him call for … not throwing out Section 230.

He does call for reining it in. He proposes lifting Section 230 immunity from sites that rely on algorithms to distribute content, noting that those algorithms act as de facto editors. He calls on federal regulators to enforce standards listed in platforms’ published contracts with readers. (He also calls for licensing AI, an end to online anonymity, ID requirements for AI images, not to mention instant runoff/ranked choice voting, ballot initiatives to end gerrymandering.)

But Brill ends up echoing the concerns of elimination-shy Section 230 reformers whose arguments he had earlier eviscerated: Trying to eliminate the measure would prove ​“not worth the price of the platforms nervously policing content to avoid publishing anything negative, even if true or just an opinion, and having to defend endless suits from offended people seeking payments from a deep-pocket defendant,” he writes.

I asked Brill about this during a conversation about the book Tuesday on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program.

He responded that fully repealing Section 230 would give platforms ​“an excuse to enact all kinds of blocking of content without really a payoff.

“So for example, let’s take the way Facebook and other platforms were clearly responsible for the crowds that formed at the Capitol on January 6, let alone the sentiment of those crowds that formed at the Capitol on January 6. Where’s the lawsuit if you eliminate Section 230, who’s got the liability? Maybe whoever the proprietor of the Capitol grounds is can sue for damages, but you and I can’t sue for damages,” Brill said.

He argued that ​“waiting for Congress to do something in Section 230 is not the solution since Congress can’t even name a postal office. [But] right in front of us right there right now there is a step that the federal government can take. The Federal Trade Commission enforces promises that people make to consumers. And if you go to Facebook, you will see its terms of service. Its terms of service say, ​‘We will not allow harmful misinformation, state-sponsored disinformation, hate speech, bullying, violent content, we will not tolerate.’ Well, they’re violating those terms of service. The Terms of Service is a contract, and the FTC could sue them this afternoon for that violation, just the way they have sued them for violating the privacy promises that they make in those exact same terms of service.”

Point well taken. No question it would be hard to build support for repealing Section 230, although a growing bipartisan coalition has formed to address social media’s predations. Based on the earlier chapters in Brill’s book, I’m not sure that we lose so much as a society if Facebook goes overboard in limiting content.

And I question if Brill’s hopes of government regulating private corporate behemoths into better behavior are in fact more realistic. Or if the more effective tactic against untruth may involve freeing attorneys with a Section 230 repeal to pounce on Meta and X et al. to repeat the Fox/Dominion miracle. That, plus simply encouraging thousands of journalists to start their own real-news local websites to offer alternatives of value.

As The Death of Truth demonstrates, whatever the fate of Section 230, plenty of other truth-destroying weapons would remain. Whatever specific strategies prove best for countering them, we’re lucky to have Steve Brill engaged in the fight on the side of light.

Click on the video to watch the full discussion with Steven Brill on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of Dateline New Haven.

Meanwhile, here’s the scarily accurate AI-generated summary of the radio interview, provided by Otter:

“Steven Brill and Paul Bass discussed the growing problem of misinformation in the digital age, highlighting the role of social media and the internet in spreading fake stories and polarizing society. They emphasized the need for transparency and accountability in the advertising and journalism industries to address this crisis, and regulating social media platforms to ensure safety and accuracy, combat disinformation, and hold platforms accountable for the content they publish. Both speakers stressed the need for accountability in the media industry to preserve trust and democracy.

“Action Items

“Read Steven Brill’s book ​‘The Death of Truth’ to learn more about the problem and proposed solutions.

“Support independent journalism by donating or subscribing to fact-based news sites.

“Contact lawmakers to advocate for reforms to curb the spread of disinformation online.

“File a complaint with the FTC about social media platforms violating their terms of service prohibiting misinformation.”