Finstas, Falsehoods and the First Amendment
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen\u2019s recent testimony before Congress has set in motion a renewed cycle of outrage over the company\u2019s practices\u2014and a renewed round of discussion around what, if anything, Congress should do to rein Facebook in. But how workable are these proposals, really?
This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Jeff Kosseff, an associate professor of cybersecurity law at the United States Naval Academy, and the guy that has literally written not just the book on this, but two of them. He is the author of \u201cThe Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet,\u201d a book about Section 230, and he has another book coming out next year about First Amendment protections for anonymous speech, titled \u201cThe United States of Anonymous.\u201d So Jeff is very well positioned to evaluate recent suggestions that Facebook should, for example, limit the ability of young people to create what users call Finstas, a second, secret Instagram account for a close circle of friends\u2014or Haugen\u2019s suggestion that the government should regulate how Facebook amplifies certain content through its algorithms. Jeff discussed the importance of online anonymity, the danger of skipping past the First Amendment when proposing tech reforms, and why he thinks that Section 230 reform has become unavoidable \u2026 even if that reform might not make any legal or policy sense.
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