New York Post

Revoke this privilege

- By POST EDITORIAL BOARD

AH, to be Twitter. Can control anything it publishes and profit from anything it wants — and not be held responsibl­e for any of it.

Such is a unanimous ruling by the Federal Election Commission, which found Twitter violated no law by censoring The Post’s factual report about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Stating that, in its view, “Twitter is likely a press entity,” the FEC said that the social-media network’s “activities fall within our press exemption.”

That’s going to be news to Twitter and Facebook, which enjoy the benefits of Section 230 of the Communicat­ions Decency Act. That law states that “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.”

In other words: When the New York Post publishes something, we can be sued for libel. We endeavor to fact-check, edit and have lawyers vet claims that appear in our stories, and if we fail to do so and the article is false, we are held responsibl­e.

But Twitter, thanks to Section 230, can throw up its collective hands and say: Not our problem! That was @hottake123 who said that. Sue them — if you can figure out their real name.

Let’s also note Twitter’s inherent political bias that Commission­er Sean Cooksey was clearly suggesting in the FEC judgment: “According to the Commission, none of the behavior at issue was for the purpose of influencin­g the 2020 presidenti­al election. I’m not so sure. In my view, the record doesn’t establish whether Twitter was consistent­ly enforcing a politicall­y neutral business policy or using its platform to support one candidate over another.”

Think of the power these platforms have been granted by the government. By the FEC’s standard, Facebook or Twitter can censor, promote or ban anything they want, based on whatever standards — or political beliefs — the companies have. But if they publish something false or defamatory, well, they can’t be held responsibl­e for that either.

Bureaucrat­s have thus turned Silicon Valley firms into all-powerful media autocrats, answerable to no one. Funny how that seems to benefit one political party the most.

However, there’s reason to think that Jack Dorsey’s beard is twitching today. By declaring Twitter a publisher, the FEC has in black and white pointed out the inherent contradict­ion of these regulation­s. Lawmakers can and should repeal Section 230 and force social-media companies to follow the same rules as other publishers. Nothing would terrify them more.

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