The much awaited showdown between the US Senators and the US big technologies got into a political slugfest. Both the sides ended up giving free pass to the 3 CEO's. The big debate revolves around the future of Section 230. Section 230 is a legal provision that provides immunity to tech giants for survival healthily. It protects their rights to regulate content on their platform. Twitter and Google defended the law fiercely. Facebook was open to possible amendments.
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The CEO's made statement like this. "Section 230 is the most important law protecting Internet speech and removing Section 230 will remove speech from the Internet," said Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter. "Our ability to provide access to a wide range of information is only possible because of existing legal frameworks like Section 230," said Alphabet Inc (Google) CEO Sundar Pichai. "I believe Congress has a role to play, too, in order to give people confidence that the process is carried out in a way that balances societies deeply held values appropriately," said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
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Jack Dorsey fielded 48 questions compared to 21 for Zuckerberg and 12 for Pichai. Three and half hours of questioning and still got underlined that tech giants are too big. Big Tech has enemies everywhere, the role of publisher, fact-checker and arbiter were played and they should not be centralised. fact checking are done by third party, are they truly neutral or are they using fact-checking as a censorship? . These pose a serious threats. The question is who is fact checking the fact checkers.
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