Law gives Gab gift to continue stirring hatred

Any innocent browser who happened upon the online grotesqueries of the Gab social network would, after quickly clicking away, doubtless presume that the offending website would soon be shut down, sued or otherwise face the wrath of the law.

After all, if a newspaper published such appalling, hate-filled screeds, it would be open to prosecution for incitement to racial hatred. Media companies like The Telegraph are bound not only by the Editors’ Code but also by the criminal code.

But, by contrast, social networking sites from Facebook down say they are not bound by the same rules. They say they are merely platforms for content, not publishers of that content. Therefore, they say, they are not responsible for what appears on their sites. Even if it is brutal, vicious, racist, misogynistic, anti-semitic, Islamophobic and the rest.

So who is responsible? Is it the individual user? Of course, but they might be near impossible to track down if they operate under a pseudonym. Is it the website, like Gab? Not us, they say. We are only a platform.

So it is that Microsoft, which provides the web infrastructure that allows Gab to appear online, is ultimately pressured to police the site. But attention could as easily fall on the internet service provider that allows the offending data to flow down the copper wires to your door.

Why is the situation this chaotic? It comes down to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) passed by the US Congress in 1996. This aimed to encourage growth of the then nascent internet by protecting websites from being sued out of existence just because some individual had posted a single awful comment on a site. The law worked – the internet blossomed. Indeed, this paragraph from the law has been described as containing the most important 26 words in the history of the web:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

But these words also had dramatic and unforeseen consequences: court rulings since have made it clear that online platforms are not liable for user-generated content – even if they set out to encourage that content.

So Gab will not be shut down. In fact, it’s legally in the clear. But while it has a legal basis to publish racist nonsense, in the era of fake news, web users are increasingly seeking out authority in their news sources. And authority clearly accrues to news publishers bound by the law to tell the truth.

‘It aimed to protect websites from being sued because an individual had posted a single awful comment on it’