In a move towards full government speech control, Sen. Amy Klobuchar introduced a bill Thursday that would strip social media platforms of liability protections if they spread health misinformation.
The bill would create an exception to Section 230, which protects platforms from lawsuits for user-generated and third-party content.
Klobuchar’s legislation introduction comes after a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which found that a significant amount of false information about vaccines comes from social-media users, per the Wall Street Journal.
Biden said last week that Facebook and other companies were killing people by spreading misinformation. He later clarified that he wasn’t accusing Facebook of killing people, but wanted the company to “do something about the misinformation, the outrageous information, about the vaccine.”
Klobuchar’s bill would put Health and Human Services in charge of determining what constitutes health misinformation and to act after consultation with other federal agencies.
“Earlier this year, I called on Facebook and Twitter to remove accounts that are responsible for producing the majority of misinformation about the coronavirus, but we need a long-term solution,” she said. “This legislation will hold online platforms accountable for the spread of health-related misinformation.”
