As far as symbolic legislation goes, Assemblyman Greg Hafen’s bill to regulate social media platforms is at least less wasteful than most. 

AB289, which has about as much of a chance of receiving a committee hearing, much less actually becoming law, as this column, only consumed 235 words’ worth of Legislative Counsel Bureau effort. Advertised as a bill which penalizes social media platforms for censoring speech, it explicitly does no such thing — as long as a social media platform can justify its content moderation through Section 230, or as long as a social media platform doesn’t represent itself as a content-neutral or viewpoint-neutral platform, it’s explicitly exempt from the provisions of the bill. 

Go ahead, search for “neutral” in Twitter’s terms of service or its rules. I’ll wait.

Not that it matters. The sole purpose of the bill, if it can be credited with having one, is to die quietly on the clerk’s desk so Assemblyman Hafen can ride the hype from Florida’s considerably more expansive social media bill to tell donors that he tried — he really tried — to pass a similar bill in Nevada and the terrible, no good, very bad Democrats in Carson City wouldn’t even give it a hearing. Once the session is over, please mail a check for $5,000 to Friends of Gregory T. Hafen, Pahrump, Nevada so he can easily defeat any challenger he’ll face in the primaries, because let’s be clear about something else — the only way Hafen involuntarily loses his seat is if a better regarded Republican runs against him. Otherwise, he could die in a brothel and his corpse would still easily defeat any Democratic challenger in Assembly District 36. 

Seriously, it’s been done. That’s how he got the job in the first place. 

On the one hand, the halfhearted level of effort put into the bill demonstrates both a level of legislative laziness and a lack of likely success which would not be out of place in certain corners of Reddit. On the other hand, it’s actually for the best that nobody, not even Assemblyman Hafen, put any effort into this transparently opportunistic attempt at harvesting the persecution complexes of his supporters. If he instead copied and pasted the contents of Florida’s HB 7013, the potential results might have been considerably worse. 

Florida’s HB 7013, like Hafen’s AB289, also claims to prevent social media platforms from censoring speech. Like Hafen’s AB289, it’s laughably toothless at this — it claims to protect the speech of political candidates (and only political candidates, making the bill delightfully self-serving) before it goes on to stress that it may only be enforced to the extent consistent with Section 230. Inexplicably following this section are 17 pages of antitrust legislation, including the creation of an “antitrust violator vendor list.” 

Section 230 prevents websites (including but not limited to social media platforms) from being held liable for the speech of their users and, as Mike Masnick pointed out on Techdirt last June, also allows websites to moderate user content as they see fit. It’s why ride sharing platforms, social media companies and credit card companies aren’t required to do business with Laura Loomer, who was deplatformed from Uber, Lyft, Facebook, Twitter, and PayPal for being an unhinged racist lunatic before she successfully won the Republican primary in Mar-A-Lago’s congressional district. Section 230 is also why nobody on the internet is obligated to give Augustus Sol Invictus, a failed Floridian senate candidate who sacrificed a goat and headlined the white supremacist protest in Charlottesville before he was arrested last year, the time of day.

In short, Section 230 prevents websites, like The Nevada Independent, from being held liable for anything you say in the comments below this column. It also empowers websites, like The Nevada Independent, to remove your posts for any or no reason at all. 

This law is based on two principles — the right to freedom of association and the right of a private property owner to control access to and use of their property. Though you absolutely have a right to freedom of expression, you don’t have a right to force someone to listen to you and you certainly don’t have a right to force someone to repeat what you said. Similarly, though you absolutely have a right to freedom of expression, you don’t have a right to leave notes on someone else’s property for passers-by to read without their permission — permission which can always be revoked at any time for any reason.

A consequence of these rights, in conjunction with Section 230, is that some people are given more consistent permission to share their thoughts on other people’s property than others. 

Naturally, there is a constituency of people who feel their swine-digested pearls of wisdom are not being shared with as many people as they should be. Naturally, where there is a constituency, there is at least one politician willing to pander to them. Sometimes such pandering takes the form of pointless bills like Hafen’s AB289 or Florida’s HB 7013. In other times, they take the form of politicians intentionally egging social media platforms on, like an aging rock star trying to rebuild credibility with the youths by getting under Tipper Gore’s skin one more time. 

In either case, the pandering always serves the interests of the politicians, not their constituency, because there’s no way to satisfy that constituency without annoying the vast majority of the rest of us. AB289 will do nothing to allow his constituents to post conspiracy theories online because, as the Washington Post pointed out over two years ago, little was stopping them to begin with. Meanwhile, Florida’s HB 7013 won’t force websites to do business with goat sacrificers and unhinged white supremacists — because who wants to be forced to do business with goat sacrificers and unhinged white supremacists?

In the case of Florida's politicians, their interest was in passing antitrust legislation past an otherwise skeptical Republican legislature. Assemblyman Hafen’s interests, meanwhile, are considerably simpler and more venal. He needs to throw enough red meat at his base to keep them from running someone more obnoxious than him in the next primary. 

Now that he’s made the thinnest of efforts, and now that we’ve acknowledged the attempt, we can all move on with our lives. 

David Colborne has been active in the Libertarian Party for two decades. During that time, he has blogged intermittently on his personal blog, as well as the Libertarian Party of Nevada blog, and ran for office twice as a Libertarian candidate. He serves on the Executive Committee for both his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is the father of two sons and an IT professional. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].