Taking Arms against A Sea of Troubles

 THE 1994 LAW gibing internet service platforms immunity from prosecution for any content posted by their users must be repealed, according to both Republicans and Democrats, for different reasons. predictably, the Democrats have a good reason, the republicans an insane, idiotic, fabricated one. Democrats, like all other discerning people, have noticed the overwhelming volume of lies, nonsense, disinformation, and hate speech online, and have decided that internet platform providers, despite their repeated promises to clean up their act, have not done so and seem to have no intention of doing so, and that therefore the only solution is to remove their immunity from prosecution and to allow the lawsuits to freely flow, which would surely tone  down the trash considerably. Conservatives, laughably, paranoically, mistakenly believe that platform providers withhold and censor conservative material, a contention for which there is no evidence. Actually, much of the hate speech iand disinformation online, like terrorism in America, is of the far right kind. If indeed conservative content is being censored, which it is in fact not, and if it were suddenly allowed to appear online, much of it would doubtless be of the hateful dishonest kind, and, in that case, heaven help us all.If online immunity from litigation were revoked, platform providers like Facebook and Twitter would suddenly become a great deal more discerning and selective about the material they permitted, and that would probably not be a bad thing. It would likely, however, reduce the amount of right wing hate speech, which, again, would arouse the ire of right wingers. No matter what happens, we are likely to be presented with the rather amusing if disingenuous spectacle of far right crusaders for hate, complaining.In a world in which anyone and everyone were free to file lawsuits agains Facebook for publishing harmful or inappropriate material, there would still be plenty of room for more truth and education,  and suddenly the swarm of posts accusing, for instance, Michelle Obama of being  a man, or that Donald Trump is under attack by a national conspiracy of pedophiles, or that covid 19 is an overblown Democratic party conspiratorial hoax intended to undermine Trump and will vanish right after the election, might mercifully disappear, for corporate fear that such nonsense would inspire litigation. Then, the only remaining problem would be how to find a way to make the people who post such idiocy in the first place disappear, along with their hateful nonsense.