webinar register page

3CMA Webinar Series: Making Sense of Section 230, the Law Communicators Love to Hate

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act may only be 26 words long, but those words have caused confusion and concern for communicators, web hosts, platforms, and even politicians. If you’re not familiar with it or wonder how it can impact your outreach and communication online, you will definitely want to be a part of this webinar.

On its face, the law is simple – platforms are not legally responsible for the acts of their users, and platforms may take down or edit any posts of their users without legal consequence. Legislators are currently debating whether this gives companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Google too much power to manage speech on their platforms, especially as some critics, including the former president, accuse them of being biased against them for political reasons. Further complicating matters is the First Amendment, which gives private businesses such as internet platforms the freedom to decide what speech they wish to host and what speech they do not.

In this webinar, attorney and media law professor Chip Stewart will discuss what Section 230 was intended to do, what it covers and what it doesn’t, what people regularly misunderstand about it, and what all of this means for public communicators.

Because of the importance of this timely topic, this webinar is being provided at no cost to both members and non-members.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Chip Stewart is an attorney and professor of journalism at the Bob Schieffer College of Communication at Texas Christian University. After working both in journalism and sports public relations in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Dr. Stewart earned a law degree at the University of Texas and practiced law for two years. He later returned to the newsroom while working on his doctorate in journalism at the University of Missouri. He has taught media law and ethics at TCU since 2008.

Apr 7, 2021 01:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)