CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION

Internet speech is now more important than could have possibly been imagined when the World Wide Web was first unveiled in the mid-1990s. The internet itself is now a gathering place, and in some cases the sole source of camaraderie, for marginalized groups—especially the younger LGBTQ+ community. Digital natives utilize social media to connect and learn from each other. Some, like the content creators in the Divino Group lawsuit, earn an income solely or primarily from allowing ad placements on the video content they create for their social media channels. YouTube, as the far-and-away leader in providing hosted video content for these communities and users, should not be one hundred percent immune from liability for wrongly disallowing viewership of, or removing advertising revenue from, those users’ videos simply because they contain LGBTQ+ keywords.

YouTube should enjoy Section 230 protections, as should any internet service provider or platform. Section 230 should not be repealed. However, our legislators need to bring Section 230 into modern times in order to allow creators adequate recourse for unintentional flagging or censorship of content that causes those creators to lose social media presence and revenue. This paper’s proposed changes to Section 230 would do just that: enable creators to have content reinstated and provide damages for loss of advertising income and loss of follower count. The changes would not require that a platform allow all speech; rather, for those platforms that purport to allow a certain manner of speech, the changes would provide incentive for them to more intelligently author and manage their censorship keywords, algorithms, and blacklist datasets. These changes would go a long way towards providing a more reliable and non-discriminatory source of viewership, income, and community for marginalized creators, such as LGBTQ+ creators.

CONCLUSION

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