Source: United States Senator for Delaware Christopher Coons
WILMINGTON, Del. – In case you missed it, the Washington Post editorial board published an endorsement of the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act (PATA), a recent bipartisan proposal by U.S. Senators Chris Coons (D-Del.), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law; Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Ranking Member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee; and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). The proposed framework would require social media companies to provide vetted, independent researchers and the public with access to certain platform data.
Washington Post: A small step toward solving our social media woes
Our social media struggles are motley and complex, but finding a solution to almost every one of them requires starting in the same place: data access. Thankfully, lawmakers are finally catching on.
Sens. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) last month unveiled the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act. The bill would compel platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to share data with university-affiliated researchers whose projects are approved by the National Science Foundation — or else lose the immunity for third-party content provided by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The proposal, unlike other Section 230 reform salvos, wouldn’t require platforms to treat speech any differently than they do today; all it would require them to do is cough up the information they possess on how tens of millions to billions of people use their products.
The full editorial is available here.
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