Columbia Law Professor Spews Blatantly False Information About Section 230 In The Wall Street Journal

Columbia Law Professor Spews Blatantly False Information About Section 230 In The Wall Street Journal

3 years ago
Anonymous $K6XgmDN5_o

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210130/01201046152/columbia-law-professor-spews-blatantly-false-information-about-section-230-wall-street-journal.shtml

Another day, another completely ridiculous, wrong, and painful op-ed in a major newspaper that gets all of the details about Section 230 wrong. And this one is particularly ridiculous because it's coming from a law professor. Professor Philip Hamburger wrote an op-ed for the WSJ that is so bad, so wrong, so clueless, that if I handed it in in one of his classes, I'd deserve a failing grade. The only thing that this piece gets is that, while I'd thought I'd seen every style of bad Section 230 takes, this one is creatively bad in new and more ridiculous ways than I'd seen before. It's titled: The Constitution Can Crack Section 230, which already seems like a weird way to kick off. Cracks... what?

Section numbers of federal statutes rarely stir the soul, but one of them, 230, stirs up much fear, for it has seemed to justify censorship. Relying on it, tech companies including Google and Twitter increasingly pull the plug on disfavored posts, websites and even people. Online moderation can be valuable, but this censorship is different. It harms Americans’ livelihoods, muzzles them in the increasingly electronic public square, distorts political and cultural conversations, influences elections, and limits our freedom to sort out the truth for ourselves.