Steven Bartlett

We have libel laws.

We have laws about terrorist content, for example.

So there are laws that regulate some parts of speech that we've agreed are good in order to maintain peace and so on.

And the platforms are exempt.

Okay.

because of Section 230.

And so the platforms have argued that we don't control what's put up on our platforms and we don't bear any responsibility for it.

I'm not sure that removing Section 230 is the best way to deal with this, but making the online world

conformed to the same laws as the offline world seems to me kind of very basic.

It seems obvious to me that child pornography that's illegal, if you have it in your house, should also be illegal if it's published online.

It seems to me that people recruiting for ISIS, that's illegal to do, you know, down the street from here, then it should also be illegal to do online.

And the tech companies have been trying in recent years, and this is an argument that's taking place both in Europe and the U.S.

and elsewhere, to get out of responsibility for just for conforming to the law in the countries where they're active.

And in one or two places, there have been big clashes.

I was just in Brazil, which is one of the places where that happened.

Where the Brazilian law said something that was published on Twitter was illegal and they fined the company for publishing it.

Twitter didn't want to pay the fine and there was an argument back and forth and for a while Twitter was shut down in Brazil.

But it does seem to me that any given country –

whether it's Brazil or Nepal or, you know, Ethiopia, and particularly democracies, I should say.

You know, democracies have the right to say, these are our laws.