A maverick antitrust scholar and celebrated free speech advocate has praised aspects of a monumental ruling on Big Tech while warning it still misses the target.
Matt Stoller, author of the bestselling book Goliath: The 100 -Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, celebrated how a “shocking opinion” from the Third Circuit signaled “Big Tech’s Free Ride” was ending. At the same time, Stoller warned that the court was wrong to treat Big Tech oligarchs as “speakers.”
The Third Circuit decision in Anderson v. TikTok held 47 U.S.C. § 230, or Sec. 230, does not apply to the algorithms tech firms use to determine what content is curated to users. Previous courts had held that Sec. 230 presented a broad “liability shield” for both what content a platform recommends and what content it censors.
Stoller explained that “at the very…
