Sen. Manchin Pushes to Create Snitching Mandate for ‘Suspicious’ Online Content

WASHINGTON — West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin (D) has renewed his efforts to erode Section 230 liability protections by inserting his extremely controversial “See Something, Say Something” bill into the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act.

Manchin’s proposal “would force companies to file ‘Suspicious Transmission Activity Reports’ (STAR) for basically anything ‘suspicious’ they see online,” TechDirt’s Mike Masnick reported today.

Back in 2020, Masnick had published a detailed analysis of Manchin’s “dangerous, stupid” mandatory snitching bill.

The bill, Masnick noted, is “a direct attack on Section 230.” Manchin is now attempting to add it as “pork” into the yearly authorization of resources for the entire U.S. military.

“You know how under the law right now, if a website finds child sexual abuse material, it needs to report it to NCMEC?,” Masnick wrote today. “Well, this law basically expands that to, well — everything. See someone mention drugs? File a report! See someone slightly mean to someone else? File a STAR. See someone joke about a bomb? STAR. On and on and on.”

The potential for abuse and lawfare by organized, well-funded groups as NCOSE and Exodus Cry to achieve their stated mission to “eradicate all online pornography” through the proposed system of rampant delation is self-evident.

Also, as Masnick points out, Manchin’s proposal targets “known suspicious transmissions,” so “it will actually encourage websites to take a less proactive approach to reviewing content, because they will claim that if they don’t look, they couldn’t have known.”

However, since “See Something, Say Something” uses the “should have reasonably known” standard, this opens platforms that tolerate adult content such as Twitter and Reddit or user-upload sites like OnlyFans or Pornhub to be challenged by deep-pocketed anti-porn crusaders and then be forced to litigate “whether you should have magically known about this bad thing found online.”

Manchin, who is nominally a Democrat, has been notorious since the start of the Biden administration for pushing against the executive’s agenda and using his tie-breaking vote in the Senate to advance positions more aligned with the Republican party and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.