Hollywood star Joseph Gordon-Levitt on Wednesday pleaded with US politicians to hold social-media platforms accountable by repealing a 30-year old law.
Mr Gordon-Levitt, who gave an emotional speech on Capitol Hill, said it is time for Congress to eliminate Section 230 in the Communications Decency Act, which legally distances social media companies from the content posted by their users, protecting companies including Meta, TikTok and X.
“These amoral companies keep allowing these awful things to happen on their platform and they won't do anything about it because they always prioritise profits over the public good, even when it comes to kids,” Mr Gordon-Levitt said.
The actor, who was invited to speak by Democratic senator Dick Durbin, said he was confident that most US citizens favoured ending Section 230.
“I want to see this thing pass 100 to zero,” Mr Gordon-Levitt said. “There should be nobody voting to give any more impunity to these technology companies.”
He was joined in Washington by parents who lost their children because of abuse on social media platforms.
“My son Devon lost his life to fentanyl poisoning at the age of 19,” said Kristin Bride. She said her son had connected with a drug dealer on the Snapchat platform in 2020, and later died of an overdose.
“Devon's death, tragically, is not an isolated incident. More than 80 per cent of teens who die from fentanyl connect with their dealers on social media."
Republican Representative Brandon Guffey, whose son took his own life after being extorted on Instagram, also pushed for the repeal of Section 230.
“Every turn that I made over the past three years to pass legislation to stop this, I always hear about Section 230,” Mr Guffey said. “They [social media companies] will not put protecting our children first."
He said that while repealing Section 230 is not a silver bullet, “it's close to it".
The technology sector has spent a significant amount of money to protect Section 230, with executives often claiming that eliminating it would put a significant burden on how they operate and unfairly make them responsible for policing content beyond their control.
Some also have warned that overturning it could affect free speech.
In 2020, US President Donald Trump briefly pushed to eliminate Section 230, claiming that it poses “a serious threat to our national security”, although he has since shifted his position.
Section 230 was based on the concept that like phone companies, internet service providers and platforms were neutral platforms.
Critics have since said that social media platforms now overshadow phone carriers in terms of influence, and that algorithms have given them disproportionate power that makes Section 230 outdated.
A proposed bill, the Sunset Section 230 Act, sponsored by Mr Durbin and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, has not yet received a vote or moved beyond the committee to which it was assigned.
If the legislation were to pass the Senate and the House of Representatives, Section 230 would only apply to social media companies for two more years before it is nullified.
