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.