In an op/ed for the Los Angeles Times, Ryan Calo, a University of Washington School of Law professor and Center for an Informed Public co-founder, and Woodrow Hartzog, a Northeastern University professor of law and computer science, write about “the several ways lawmakers and the public might move to hold [social media] platforms more accountable for building and maintaining an environment they know to be dangerous.”
Calo and Hartzog wrote in the L.A. Times:
Lawmakers and courts can and should distinguish between attributing user speech to platforms — which the law properly forbids — and failing to take reasonable measures to keep the community safe. A company with inadequate cybersecurity can face consequences when it fails to ward off an easily foreseeable hack, even though the company isn’t the hacker. The same should be true of harmful misinformation, especially when the platform’s own terms of service lay out the sort of community the user should expect.
>> Read their op/ed, “Banning Trump from Twitter and Facebook isn’t nearly enough,” in the L.A. Times.
