Section 230: Bringing you up to speed
Tonda Rush
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Scott Hunter | 04:22 pm - Thu, February 25 2021
Finally, discussion on the single greatest cause of the decline of our industry. Section 230's protections used by social media platforms destroyed the legal framework around publishing in which the culture had learned to navigate town square discussions about … everything.
Undermining that has led us to what we now face, but we are considering all the wrong options. Making huge corporations the arbiters of truth on their gigantic platforms is not the answer. Changing the law that made them possible is.
The problem is more pernicious than the current national debate assumes. Section 230 has directly led to the decline of the town square itself, and consequently the community newspaper industry. People post to their little groups on Facebook or other SM platforms now, believing that everybody now knows what they do; they've published it to the world, they think. No need to send a letter to the editor or seek help promoting their latest fundraiser in a small town.
At the same time, the SMs have built their businesses on the backs of actual publishers (in the old sense) using algorithms that only seek to keep eyeballs on their sites, by any means necessary. Unfortunately, human beings will always pay more attention to stimuli that make us afraid before those which encourage us to reason. That breeds division in society, nourishing outrage before reasoned discussion, and undercutting the very foundations of democracy. All that is made possible by SMs taking most of the advertising revenue from the former town square, but none of the responsibility.
Our business model as community publishers happens to be a casualty of this development, made possible in 1996 by one paragraph Congress wrote to protect a new business form that no longer exists.
Rescinding 230 could set off a chain of events as unforeseeably radical as enacting it did, but at least one publisher of one tiny newspaper, having watched its effects take hold over decades, is willing to take that chance.
If you are working in states where the appellate courts have not yet ruled, be advised that your ability to record is not as clearly established
There have been disputes over the years about whether privacy rights protect the object of your lens if YOU are in public but your subject is not, such as instances where you use a telephoto lens to shoot a picture through the window of the house. But generally, there has been no dispute about the right to take photos of things happening in clear view of the general public.
What happens when a letter-writer wants to take back their letter?
Q: A reader sent a letter to the editor on a topic of great controversy in our community. Then, after thinking more about it, the reader told us not to publish. But we have the letter. We have the right to publish it, yes?
Encrypted police scanner systems shut out press and the public
The disappearing police scanner has been a topic for journalists since 9-11. That is because the need for a national communications policy to bring federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement and first responder systems into closer communication provided a jumping off place for police to scrape reporters off the scanner feeds.