This week, Senator Joe Manchin announced that he won’t support HR 1, the sweeping election reform legislation that passed the House and has been languishing in the Senate, effectively torpedoing its passage. But policymakers shouldn’t scrap the bill entirely. For legislators who are serious about expanding platform liability to fight online misinformation, a few provisions hidden deep in HR1 provide one of the best options for reform.
Many of the legislators who have been hesitant to support HR1, including Senator Manchin, have professed a strong desire to regulate online misinformation, specifically calling for reform of Section 230 to expand tech platform liability. Absent from the debate around HR 1 is the fact that provisions—buried within hundreds of pages of the bill’s dense legislative language—would make tech platforms liable for one key type of online misinformation: voter suppression. Out of the dozens of proposals to reform Section 230, this section of HR 1 is one of the most promising.
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