What techniques are “unfair competition in the marketplace of ideas”
is rightly a matter of public debate, and such an open-ended inquiry may
raise may concerns about the wide range of liability platforms might face.
In the very least, the elimination of immunity from platforms that actively
support the use of these techniques in inﬂuencing public discourse seems
warranted and less controversial. Scholars Danielle Keats Citron and
Benjamin Wittes have proposed such an approach, proposing an
amendment that would explicitly prevent the limitation of liability for
“Bad Samaritan” websites and other content hosts that “purposefully
encourage” a deﬁned set of illegal acts” (Citron and Wittes 2017). While
their focus is on issues of sex trafﬁcking and nonconsensual pornography,
a similar approach might be taken to contend with the challenges of
political disinformation.
Social_Media_and_Democracy