Thread by @fightfortheftr

NEW: We've launched a new campaign to make it super easy for you to tell @AjitPaiFCC and the @FCC exactly what you think about the White House executive order to gut #Section230 and censor the Internet. The deadline is Sept 17, submit your comment at SaveOnlineFreeSpeech.org

DC is in a panic about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Democrats and Republicans have taken aim at this obscure piece of legislation, called the “26 words that created the Internet.” The only problem is that they have absolutely no clue what they’re talking about.

Simply put, messing with Section 230 in the ways they’re suggesting could force tens of thousands of websites to shut down, silence the voices of millions of people, and open the floodgates for widespread censorship of our videos, memes, selfies, blogs, and social media posts.

But now the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has launched an official public comment period on a White House executive order that would shred Section 230 and turn the agency, and its boss Ajit Pai, into online speech police. Yep. That Ajit Pai. Remember #netneutrality?

If you think social media companies’ moderation policies are bad now, just wait til government bureaucrats are in charge of it.

(Gonna pause partway through this thread to remind you that the whole point of this is to get you to go to SaveOnlineFreeSpeech.org & submit a comment)

The good news is that this executive order is so poorly written, and so blatantly violates the First Amendment, that even Ajit Pai has signaled that he’s against it. So we can still stop this (If we can get everyone to go to SaveOnlineFreeSpeech.org, which you should do right now)

Enemies of Internet freedom ranging from telecom monopolies like AT&T to anti-LGBTQ hate groups have already flooded the agency with hundreds of comments supporting the misguided idea of gutting Section 230. We have to fight them with REAL comments! techdirt.com/articles/20200…

Politicians from both sides of the aisle have turned #Section230 into a political talking point, which has made it so tons of people are very very confused about what it actually does. Both Biden and Trump have called to repeal this law, for example, but for opposite reasons (!)

FACTS: Section 230 is the law that allows you to post “my landlord is a chump” without your landlord suing the site you post it on out of existence. It’s the law that allows people to post videos of police violence online and makes it really hard for the government to censor them

#Section230 lets people criticize politicians, CEOs, & other powerful people who would rather we all shut up. It’s also the law that allows websites & forums to make good-faith efforts to remove extremely harmful content, like child abuse imagery or videos encouraging self-harm.

From SOPA/PIPA to #SESTA/#FOSTA to the repeal of #netneutrality we’ve seen over and over again just how dangerous it can be when politicians who don’t understand the Internet try to regulate it, or turn it into a political talking point for their re-election campaigns.

Killing off Section 230 is a dangerous idea that is gaining steam in Washington, DC. If we don’t resoundingly smack it down now, one of these proposals is eventually going to succeed. That's why we need EVERYONE to submit comments to the FCC at SaveOnlineFreeSpeech.org