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New bill aims to punish tech companies that censor “lawful speech”

This bill is the latest in the move against Big Tech's control over public discourse.

Conservative politicians in the US are not giving up on trying to shift the overwhelmingly unfavorable climate against them, the tone of which is set by the most powerful tech companies as the key platforms where human interaction happens today.

While Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA) has long been touted as the very reason that allowed early internet entrepreneurship to flourish - mostly thanks to protecting companies from getting obliterated by lawsuits equating them with responsibility for what third-party content creators (i.e., users) published on there - some argue that the power dynamics and motivations have changed so profoundly 24 years later - that this legislation itself is urgently in need of at least an overhaul.

Beside allowing Big Tech to live out the ultimate capitalist "from garage riches to trillion dollar business" dream - the CDA and particularly Section 230 with its "safe harbor" protection has in the process created what some see as veritable monsters.

A group of Republican members of US Congress just proposed a new legislation - "Stop the Censorship Act of 2020" aimed at stripping tech and social media giants of Section 230 protections - but only where they remove "lawful speech on their platform."

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