Opinion: With its latest user ban, Facebook is starting to look more like a news organization
A display is shown at the F8 Facebook Developers conference in San Jose, Calif., Tuesday. By Megan McArdle Megan McArdle Columnist Bio Follow Columnist May 3 It is hard to see how society will be worse now that Facebook has banned Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones and assorted other hateful extremists from its services.
Though, to be sure, we already get our information mostly from a relatively small number of people, who collectively decide what the nation as a whole will learn about. We call them news organizations and, until the Internet came around, that was the only way most people had to find out what was happening.
But it’s worth noting that essentially the same thing is happening with old media as the market consolidates into a handful of outlets in just a few cities. To the extent that people worry about censorship, their anxiety is better focused not on Facebook or Twitter, but on the economic and technological forces denuding the media landscape of most of its diversity.
The platforms are immune from such suits under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. The law treats them as a neutral pass-through — something like a community bulletin board — and doesn’t hold them responsible for what users post there. That is eminently practical given the sheer volume of material the platforms have to deal with.
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