Steven Bartlett

And the people who are really in favor of free speech and they're vanishingly few are the people who are willing to call it out on both sides.

And one of the things you often hear now from these so-called free speech warriors is that they're perfectly happy to shout about the left canceling people or left-wing rhetoric that they don't like.

But then they keep quiet when it comes from the other side.

So there is a difference between someone sending you an email and saying, you know, look, this has been flagged by a monitoring group as maybe fake or as maybe Russian disinformation or as, you know, coming from some kind of foreign influence campaign.

And so, you know, it would be great if you took it down or demoted it.

And there's a difference between that and taking over the company in order that the president gets to dictate what's on it.

Nobody coerced Meta into doing anything.

Or Twitter.

Nobody said, you know, Twitter will pay a fine if you don't do X or Y. In the context of people looking for foreign influence campaigns, there were conversations about what was appropriate to print and what wasn't.

So Section 230 essentially allows the platforms to escape the rules that newspapers, for example, have to abide by.

So actually we do have regulations.

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.