Brian Schatz (D-HI) and John Thune (R-SD), is a huge step forward. Instead, it exposes platforms to an unknown array of state laws under vague standards, to be interpreted by courts at some future date - leaving companies to guess how they need to redesign their services to avoid huge civil fines or criminal prosecution.Īgainst this backdrop, the “ Platform Accountability and Consumer Transparency Act ” (the PACT Act), sponsored by Sens. It gives up on the idea of setting clear rules for platform content moderation operations at all.

The more recent EARN IT draft, which passed out of committee on July 2, is, in a way, worse. EARN IT told platforms’ operational teams that they would be subjected to some rules eventually – but left those rules to be determined by an unaccountable body at some later date, after the law was already in place. But its mechanism for achieving that goal was basically a punt. Its goal was incredibly important: to combat the scourge of child sexual exploitation online. The original version of the EARN IT Act in particular failed in this regard.

Bills like FOSTA and EARN IT proclaimed important goals, but did not lay out a system to actually achieve them. Until recently, despite the seemingly daily drumbeat of legislative proposals in this area, none of the lawmakers seemed to have talked to any plumbers. If you’re trying to enforce laws by making platforms liable for users’ unlawful posts, you’ll incentivize removal of lawful speech, encouraging platforms to appease anyone who merely claims online speech is illegal. If you’re trying to enforce Terms of Service, you’ll get erratic and unfair outcomes. If you don’t identify rules and operational logistics that function at scale, then you won’t accomplish what you set out to do. “But you quickly discover that what you really need are plumbers.” The daily work of enforcing Terms of Service, or honoring legal takedown demands under laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), is all about the plumbing. “You might go into it thinking that online information flows are best managed by someone with the equivalent of a PhD in hydrology,” he says. Alex Feerst, one of the great thinkers about Internet content moderation, has a revealing metaphor about the real-world work involved.

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