The Harris-Walz Tech Policy Platform… is still bad

of the get-better-tech-policy-people-please department

As we head into the presidential election, there’s one thing we’ve seen in the last two elections: the technology policies of both major parties are terrible.

Donald Trump’s 2025 Republican platform is beyond insane with all sorts of nonsense. The “tech” part of it is barely worth mentioning, but the fact that they see things like age verification laws as a first step toward banning pornography should give you some idea of ​​how insane (and against fundamental rights) it is.

That said, the Democratic platform isn’t great. It’s not insane, like the GOP plan, but it’s still bad overall. It’s the kind of thing that’s going to lead to a lot of wasted time and effort as moral panic-don’t-know-what “we’ve-got-to-do-something” types throw around one bad idea after another, while people who actually understand how this stuff works should be doing their best to educate us against the bullshit.

Much of the tech policy portion of the document appears to have been written for Biden, assuming he were the nominee, so there’s always the chance that Harris will somehow change it later. But on most tech policy issues, she’s aligned with Biden. In particular, they’ve both hated Section 230 for ages. Biden has pushed for it to be repealed and has championed KOSA despite the clear harm it will do to children (particularly LGBTQ+ children).

Harris hasn’t been great on these issues either. When she was Attorney General of California, she brought a highly questionable case against Backpage that was dismissed under Section 230. She then went after Backpage executives directly in another horrific case, accusing them of “digital pimping.” In both cases, she went after a platform or its executives for the actions of the platform’s users. As we’ve seen in the years since Backpage was shut down by the federal government, it’s only put more women in danger.

Furthermore, she was among the state attorneys general who signed a very stupid letter demanding that Congress amend Section 230 so that they could ignore Section 230.

So none of this is all that surprising from Biden or Harris, but still… it’s not great to see in their official platform:

We also need to fundamentally reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects technology platforms from liability even if they host or distribute violent or illegal content. This will ensure that platforms take responsibility for the content they share.

The problem, as has been explained to government officials (and Congress) time and again, is that platforms Doing Take responsibility for the content you share, otherwise users and (especially) advertisers will leave.

The platform also distorts the Surgeon General’s report on children’s mental health and social media:

President Biden believes that all companies, including tech companies, should be held accountable for the harm they cause. The president has raised alarms that social media and other platforms have allowed abusive and even criminal behavior like cyberstalking, child sexual exploitation, and non-consensual intimate images to flourish on their sites — and called on Democrats and Republicans to join together on legislation to address these problems. The Surgeon General has issued a warning about the impact of social media on the mental health of young people, noting that he cannot conclude that social media is safe for children and adolescents. Democrats will pass bipartisan legislation to protect children’s privacy and stop Big Tech from collecting personal data from children and teens online, ban targeted advertising to children, and impose stricter limits on the personal data these companies collect about all of us.

I mean, yes, the Surgeon General concluded that he could not conclude that it was safe for children… but he also said that it was helpful for many children and similarly “could not conclude” that it was inherently harmful.

But the way the Democratic platform presents it is much more frightening and misleading.

Either way, it’s a small part of a much larger platform, and technical issues aren’t going to be a big deal this year. It’s also hoped that if it gets elected, it will put other, more pressing issues on the congressional agenda instead of screwing up the internet based on pseudoscience and a misunderstanding of the First Amendment.

And of course it’s not that Trump is better in this area.

Posted under: democratic platform, freedom of speech, internet policy, joe biden, kamala harris, kosa, mental health, section 230, technology policy, tim walz