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Dean Eckles Signs on to Section 230 Amicus Brief

January 26, 2023

Dean Eckles

The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT)  and six technologists with expertise in online recommendation systems in December filed an amicus brief in Gonzalez v. Google. The brief urges the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) to hold that Section 230’s liability shield applies to claims against interactive computer service providers like Twitter, based on their recommendation of third-party content, because those claims treat providers as publishers.

The amicus brief explains that the petitioners’ proposed distinction between display and recommendation is technologically arbitrary and unworkable.

MIT IDE lead researcher, Dean Eckles, is among those supporting the CDT and others who filed a SCOTUS brief urging the court to hold that Section 230 applies to recommendations of content.

The coalition that joined the brief includes: CDT; Robin Burke, Professor of Information Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder; Matt Cutts, former Administrator of the United States Digital Service and former Distinguished Engineer at Google; Dean Eckles, Associate Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is also affiliated with the Schwarzman College of Computing; Michael Ekstrand, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Boise State University; Brandie Nonnecke, Associate Research Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley and Director of the CITRIS Policy Lab; and Jonathan Stray, Senior Scientist at the Center for Human-Compatible AI, UC Berkeley.

Read more here.