Big Tech Immunity Explained: Law Professor Adam Candeub on How to Rein In Section 230 Abuse

“Who is raising children? It’s not really parents, it’s not teachers, it’s not coaches or clergymen. It’s Twitter influencers. They’re the ones that have the ears and souls of our children.”I sit down with Adam Candeub, professor of law at Michigan State University and a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America. Candeub served as acting deputy and then acting assistant secretary of the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) during Trump’s presidency. He was outspoken in his criticism of what he sees as the abuse and expansion of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Law—a federal provision that grants social media companies protection from liability.“This rather limited protection that sort-of mimicked the telephone, the telegraph, and we’ve had for hundreds of years and we couldn’t really survive without, has morphed into a protection of the platforms for anything they do,” Candeub says.Candeub currently advocates for the “common carrier” approach to social media, and is involved in a number of major First Amendment cases, both at the state and federal level, which will likely shape the future of Big Tech’s impact on our society.“We have given power to these agencies—the gobbledygook alphabet soup of security agencies—that are not really accountable to anybody. And like any other agency, they tend to be co-opted by special interests,” says Candeub.