 In summary, section 230 says that platforms cannot be held liable for user-generated content as long as it's lawful speech. And that has given them a lot of ability to grow because it would be pretty much impossible to run a social network if you had to be constantly checking everything that someone posted to make sure it's not defaming somebody or making some sort of comment that someone's going to sue you the provider over. And that is so it's essential to the existence of these platforms. And it's something that Biden and his team over this time period has consistently and continually said they want to take a look at. And they have set it under circumstances where it's quite close to where they're talking about they don't like the behavior that these platforms are engaging in or what they're allowing to proliferate. So let's start with a clip of candidate Biden in January 2020 saying this to the New York Times editorial board. Mr. Vice President, in October your campaign sent a letter to Facebook regarding an ad that falsely claimed that you blackmailed Ukrainian officials to not investigate your son. And I'm curious, did that experience dealing with Facebook and their power, did that change the way that you see the power of tech platforms right now? No, I've never been a fan of Facebook as you probably know. I've never been a big Zuckerberg fan. I think he's a real problem. Then being exempt, which you're not exempt, you can't write something you're knowing to be false and being exempt from being sued, but he can't. Section 230 should be revoked immediately. Should be revoked, number one, for Zuckerberg and other platforms. That's a pretty foundational love of the modern That's right, exactly right. And it should be revoked. It should be revoked because it is not merely an internet company. It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false. And we should be setting standards not unlike the Europeans are doing it relative to privacy. You guys still have editors. I'm sitting with them. Not a joke. There is no editorial impact at all on Facebook. None. None whatsoever. It's irresponsible. It's totally irresponsible. If there's proven harm that Facebook has done, should someone like Mark Zuckerberg be submitted to criminal penalties, perhaps? He should be submitted to civil liability in his company to civil liability just like you would be here at the New York Times. So there's Biden coming in hot. Zuckerberg, that guy's a real problem. And then once he got in office, I've got two clips from his press secretary that I want to play in succession. The first is from around that same time period when, yeah, it's from Jen Psaki. It's from around that same time period that the Murthy statement came out. So let's play that one first. Jen Psaki really likes Section 230. The President's view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation and misinformation, especially related to COVID-19 vaccinations and elections. And we've seen that over the past several months. Broadly speaking, I'm not placing any blame on any individual or group. We've seen it from a number of sources. He also supports better privacy protections and a robust antitrust program. So his view is that there's more that needs to be done to ensure that this type of misinformation, disinformation, damaging, sometimes life-threatening information is not going out to the American public. Okay. And so there she is. That was in May, 2021, saying that, you know, we have a real problem with the kind of information they're letting flourish. It would be a shame if we took a look at Section 230 and also some antitrust action that's really at the front of our minds. Strangely, in 2022, that same pair came up after Elon Musk purchased Twitter and said that he wasn't going to be suppressing that sort of information anymore. Let's play that clip for a moment. Breaking news. Twitter agreeing to let Elon Musk purchase. Do you have a response to that? And does the White House have any concern that this new agreement might have President Trump back on the platform? Well, I'm not going to comment on a specific transaction. What I can tell you as a general matter, no matter who owns or runs Twitter, the President has long been concerned about the power of large social media platforms. The power they have over our everyday lives has long argued that tech platforms must be held accountable for the harms they cause. He has been a strong supporter of fundamental reforms to achieve that goal, including reforms to Section 230 and acting antitrust reforms requiring more transparency and more. And he's encouraged that there's bipartisan interest in Congress. So clearly, it's like a reflex. Whenever we're talking about misinformation, we're going to bring up this threat of Section 230 reform and antitrust. I guess my question for you, John, is that really illegal, though, or is that just kind of using the bully pulpit in a way that's First Amendment protected? Does it abridge speech? I think it does. I think that you're bringing to bear, this is worth billions, 230 is worth billions to these companies. And the fact that there's bipartisan anger over it, and I've never seen that clip of Biden you just ran, that is even more explicit. Maybe it'll be in my next brief, but I think that what you have here is it's a threat to take away billions of dollars from these corporations and to change their whole way they work. And even if you can't get Congress to go along, here you can have Republicans in those clips on 230, by the way, as well. But the administration itself can take positions. You can have the Justice Department take a position that 230 doesn't cover this or 230 doesn't cover that. That's a huge headache for these. So you don't even need to pass legislation. So it's a huge threat as the Fifth Circuit judges were asking, nice social media company you have there, shame if anything was going to happen to it. And so I think that it is when you look at this whole of government and the whole of the threat. This is not a one-off. This is not JFK calling in the steel guys and saying, steel prices are a little high, and you guys watch it or something one time. This is the administration contacting them every day, every week constantly. So then would your argument be then that they should just never be able to make those sort of statements that these are actually kind of illegal veiled threats? So the argument is that they, first of all, this doesn't cover Biden, right? The courts are not going to tell the president what to say or not say. So Biden would still say what he's going to say on your clips, and that'll go in. But that can then be used that the agencies are doing this, that or the other thing for this reason. But yes, the fact that they're contacting these companies to tell them who to keep on and who to keep off is the problem, not that they have their own views. When we depose the CDC, I don't know what's going to come out about the census, but they got these portals into all the social media companies during the census. The census wanted to get its message out to communities that were afraid of the census coming there. So they'd say, look, we don't do this. We don't do immigration. We don't do all these things. And the social media platforms gave them these portals so that they could get their messages out onto the portals and learn how to get it higher up. That wasn't a problem. We have never heard that the Census Bureau had people take down, don't answer the door, but it was then metastasized when COVID came along. And this portal and this idea of, hey, we don't really know much about social media, how do we get our message out there, turn to, how do we stop these people's messages? And that's the problem. When they're saying, I don't like this message, take it down. That's what the problem is. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from my conversation with Jay Bhattacharya and John Vecchioni about Missouri v. Biden, a very important legal case about the future of social media and free speech. For another clip from that, click here. For the full conversation, click here.