Whenever Twitter proceeds to vet, censor, or weigh in on topics posted on its platform, it ostensibly acts as a publisher and "validates" the truth of anything posted, according to Alan Dershowitz on Newsmax TV.
"The real problem is when you're a platform and you get the immunity and you decide to eliminate certain things, then other things are taken to be true," Dershowitz told "Saturday Report," on the heels of Twitter's subjective censoring of the New York Post report on Hunter Biden's emails.
"You can't have the kind of mixture that Twitter today has, which is: We're going censor some things, particularly from some political parts of the spectrum, but other things go uncensored."
Being an arbiter of truth should preclude Twitter from getting liability protections from the Federal Communications Commission's Section 230, which is granted to social media entities as "platforms" instead of "publishers."
"I think that 230 is a little too broad and too permissive," Dershowitz told host Carl Higbie. "In exchange for this kind of immunity, you have to give us standards, you have to give us accountability, you have to demonstrate to us that you're applying a single standard – and that you're not using the subjective criteria of truth."
Dershowitz mentioned social media platforms need to be subject to the "taxi cab theory," where they pick up everyone regardless of politics and not just pick up their friends.
Dershowitz concluded "court decisions won't resolve this because the statute is written in very broad language," and reforms will have to come from congressional legislation.
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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