#TM1T: Section 230 with Preston Byrne
In this episode, I talked to Preston J Byrne.
Preston is a partner at Anderson Kill and focuses on working with early stage tech startups and VC firms on everything from corporate transactions to IP and cross border issues. He’s a fixture in the crypto community and has almost encyclopaedic knowledge of how the space has developed, as well as the legal implications for developers, investors and customers of crypto products.
I turned to him because I wanted to get the point of view of someone that actually knew what the law said. almost everything else I read on the internet was clouded by opinion.
The world is so interconnected now that a law like Section 230 has implications across the world. Most of the dominant social media platforms in the world – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and Whatsapp – are operated by US-based companies.
I don’t live in the US and never have, but speaking to Preston confirmed one of my suspicions about the effect of US law on free speech across the world. A quote (lightly edited for clarity):
I do some work with interactive computer services companies and I've seen takedown requests come in from countries like Pakistan, France, Germany, the United Kingdom.
Those countries decide they want speech which would be allowed in the United States but banned in those countries removed. That’s scary as an American, the idea that legal speech would come down because a police officer said, “this offends the sensibilities of someone in my country”.
Section 230 really allows these American companies to tell those foreign governments to go away and that's something where it's, they're perfectly within their rights and that promotes free speech everywhere, because America has a very liberal, free speech regime.
The entire episode is 18:44 minutes long. Let me know what you thought.
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Links
Find Preston on Twitter @prestonjbyrne (same handle on Parler)
Preston's blogpost on this topic: https://prestonbyrne.com/2020/10/29/republicans-stop-begging-the-government-to-protect-you-from-internet-censorship/
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