Joe Biden is among a growing number of politicians who would like to see social media sites held accountable. Photo / Getty Images
Joe Biden is among a growing number of politicians who would like to see social media sites held accountable. Photo / Getty Images
Joe Biden launched a stinging attack on Mark Zuckerberg on Friday for allowing false political advertising on Facebook, calling for the law that shields internet platforms from being held liable for user-generated content to be "revoked immediately".
Biden, who is among the frontrunners for the Democratic presidential nomination, said thatSection 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which has long protected social media groups from legal action if users post illicit content, should be abolished.
Instead, both Facebook and its founder should be "submitted to civil liability" for the posts that appear on its apps, the former vice-president said, in the same way that a newspaper would be for its content.
In the strongly worded interview published in the New York Times, Biden also raised the possibility that, given revelations that some Russian disinformation campaigns ran adverts in the lead-up to the 2016 election, Zuckerberg's laissez-faire approach may have "amounted to collusion that in fact caused harm that would in fact be equal to a criminal offense".
The call to fully repeal Section 230, the first to be made by a US presidential hopeful, is likely to prompt strong opposition from all social media platforms, who would be required to overhaul the way they moderate content, or face penalties.
It comes days after the embattled social media group said it would not alter its political advertising rules to ban misleading adverts or the practice of microtargeting narrow groups of users on the platform, despite growing pressure from Democrats to make changes.
"[Section 230] should be revoked because [Facebook] is not merely an internet company," said Biden, who has so far positioned his campaign as business-friendly. "It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false, and we should be setting standards not unlike the Europeans are doing relative to privacy."
Tension between Biden's campaign and Facebook escalated in October last year after the platform ran a false political advert claiming the former vice-president blackmailed Ukrainian officials in order to thwart an investigation into his son, Hunter.
Donald Trump's efforts to get his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden are at the centre of the US president's impeachment scandal.
Nevertheless, Facebook has stood by its policy of allowing adverts from politicians to run without fact-checking — a decision celebrated by Trump's campaign — arguing that internet platforms should not act as censor or kingmaker. It will also continue to allow candidates to narrowly target users.
Biden, who has also been the target of Russian-backed disinformation campaigns on Facebook, added: "Zuckerberg finally took down those ads that Russia was running. All those bots about me. They're no longer being run. He was getting paid a lot of money to put them up."
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been accused of cosying up with Donald Trump. Photo / Getty Images
Biden's campaign so far has spent $3.6m on digital advertising on Facebook since the beginning of 2019, and $1.7m on Google ads, according to data from 2020 Campaign Tracker.
Facebook declined to comment. But testifying in front of lawmakers last week, Monika Bickert, the company's vice-president of global policy management defended the "importance" of Section 230 in allowing user-generated content to exist.
The social media platform is now under pressure from Democratic politicians on multiple fronts. Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator and nominee, has said she would break apart the company were she in power, in order to promote competition in the sector.
On Thursday, Nancy Pelosi, the House of Representatives speaker, said Facebook "schmoozed" the Trump administration in order to receive tax cuts and avoid antitrust regulation.
