1. @annawiener has a great new article on Section 230 in the New Yorker this morning. IR scholars tend not to pay much attention to domestic laws like 230. In a new piece (forthcoming in @IntOrgJournal) @ANewman_forward and I argue that's a mistake
2. A next to-final draft is here - dropbox.com/s/tvyxmwqvwwjf…. Our argument is straightforward - that rules like 230, which effectively delegate the regulation of user-generated content to platform companies - were the foundation of the global communications order.
3. They not only underpinned the business models of companies like Facebook, but seemed like a win-win for the US model of liberalism, spreading US values (open communication) at the same time as they promoted the economic interests of US companies.
4. This was because private sector self-regulation, open global communications, and national level liberal democracy all appeared to be mutually reinforcing. The US promoted self-regulation at the expense of traditional multilateral institutions like the ITU.
5. Non-democratic regimes didn't like this, because they believed that open communications flows were being weaponized against their system of rule, but since the ITU, UN etc were sidelined, they didn't have much effective recourse beyond domestic censorship
6. Now, however, the debate has changed substantially. In part this is because non-democratic regimes developed new techniques to protect their own rule such as what @mollyeroberts describes as "flooding" - degrading political discourse through injecting divisive/spurious content
7. As per work with @schneierblog papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…, there's at least reason to suspect that these techniques undermined democratic states, when employed by foreign, or (more worrying) domestic actors. Worries about this possibility have transformed debate in US and world.
8. These fears have helped transform the debate over self-regulation and open information within states. Rightly or wrongly, platforms like Facebook or Twitter get the blame for weakening democracy in US and elsewhere. Not clear that they are more responsible than e.g. Fox.
9. But equally, their business models make it hard for them to regulate speech of their users (automated techniques don't work well for moderating complex political arguments). Hence, debates like the ones @annawiener describes.
10. On the one hand, Donald Trump and Republicans don't like 230, because they believe that it empowers platform companies that have implicitly or explicitly liberal values, and want to regulate conservative speech out of existence.
11. On the other, Democratic politicians like Joe Biden blame 230 for a business model that they think helped Russian trolls elect Trump. Regardless of what you think of the factual merits of either of these beliefs, they point politically in the same direction.
12. Towards the undermining of a tacit consensus on the benefits of Sectrion 230 in the US, and the explicit politicization of debates over platform self-regulation. Platforms didn't want to become explicit regulators - they now have little choice.
13. This has important international consequences. US defense of self-regulation has been the cornerstone of the international information regime. Now, the US is likely to be at best lukewarm in its defense, regardless of who wins in November.
14. The EU is already pioneering a model that brings together antitrust, privacy and speech regulation in a pro-active regulatory approach. India is considering major regulatory changes. So it isn't just the authoritarian regimes that are unhappy with the current model.
15. They are still pressing their case for increased national control, and China would like to bring the ITU back to the center of debate, displacing self-regulation with a multilateral approach where authoritarian states would have greater control.
16. As we argue in the article, this tells us how the existing international open communications flows order effectively undermined itself, generating authoritarian behavior and platform business models that generated new kinds of dissent in core states.
17. In a sense, communications is a proxy for the current fights about the "Liberal International Order," (a term that we use, but that is also contested). People tend to think of orders as coherent sets of rules and behaviors that reinforce each other ...
18. While very often, they are more like Rube Goldberg machines that work to break themselves apart as a semi-inevitable consequence of their operation. IR debates about the "Liberal International Order" absorbed a lot of arguments from old-style historical institutionalism
19. which emphasized the importance of increasing returns, mutually reinforcing relationships between institutions and interests etc. But historical institutionalist debates have moved on - and one of the things we want to do is to encourage IR people to read and use recent work
20. to think more systematically about how international institutions - whether they are the liberal self-regulatory communications order, or the ecoomic order focused around the WTO, or whatever, can be self-undermining, not self-reinforcing. Finis.
