Many people might have seen the tweet from the person who posts under the name “ThePatriotOasis,” which claimed that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz deleted a series of tweets praising Vance Boelter. Boelter was the person who had murdered the former Speaker of Minnesota’s House of Representatives, along with her husband, and shot another Democratic member of the Minnesota House and his wife. He apparently had a long list of Democrats and abortion providers who he may also have intended to kill.

Needless to say, associating Governor Walz with this politically motivated assassin is pretty damning. It also is completely untrue. The only known link of Walz to Boelter was that he was reappointed to one of the state’s advisory commissions. He had been originally appointed by the prior governor, presumably on the recommendation of a Republican politician. (These boards usually are constructed to have bipartisan input.) It’s not clear that Walz ever even met Boelter to shake his hand, much less have any sort of real friendship or association with him.

Nonetheless, ThePatriotOasis (TPO) pushed this lie about Governor Walz to their followers on Twitter. With assists from Utah Senator Mike Lee and others, they got over 7 million people to see the lie. This lie is obviously damaging to Governor Walz, insofar as anyone believed it. Being good buddies with a serial killer does not show good judgement.

The lie was also bad for Democrats and liberals. It helped to conceal the fact that the killer was a far-right Trump supporter. Many people probably still believe that Boeltler was some sort of mixed-up Democrat who suddenly felt the need to start shooting prominent political figures and just happened to pick Democrats.

This would be exactly the sort of situation for which defamation laws were written. Someone makes up a lie with the intent to damage a person’s reputation. There is appropriately a higher standard of proof for a public figure like Governor Walz to prove defamation. He has to show that not only is the post a lie, but that TPO acted with reckless disregard for the truth.

I’ll leave that question for the judge and jury, but it’s worth considering how this works with Section 230. Walz has a clear case against TPO, who posted the tweet. I don’t know who TPO is, but presumably Governor Walz’s lawyers can identify the person or people behind the post. Let’s assume that TPO is a normal middle-class person with a normal middle-class job.

In that case, the amount of damages that Walz could collect would be very limited for a lie that could seriously impair his political career. Suits like this can lead to damages in the millions or tens of millions of dollars, far beyond the resources of a normal middle-class person, meaning Walz could only collect a fraction of what might be determined to be his damages.

If this lie was broadcast on a television or radio station, or appeared in a newspaper, Walz could also sue these outlets. The logic is that TPO yelling their lies on a street corner doesn’t have much impact on Walz’s reputation, but wholesaling these lies through broadcast or print media can. Furthermore, the media outlet that wholesales the lies is profiting from them insofar as the lies draw more attention to them. Since the media outlets both share responsibility for the damage, and also profited from them, it is reasonable to hold them liable.

However, the option to sue the outlet that wholesaled the defamation does not exist with Internet platforms because of Section 230. Section 230 allows Elon Musk to mass market as much defamatory material as he wants, put the money from the clicks in his pockets, and tell Governor Walz or anyone else who is harmed to eat shit and die. That doesn’t seem right.

I have argued that we should try to alter the structure of defamation law to fit the Internet, just as we had to alter it to fit broadcast media. It is not feasible for huge sites like Facebook or X to monitor for defamatory material the hundreds of millions of items posted there daily. But we could require that they respond to takedown notices from people complaining about defamatory material, as they do now with items that are alleged to infringe on copyrights.

The Digital Millennial Copyright Act (DMCA) requires Internet sites to promptly remove material that is infringing on a copyright in order to protect themselves from liability. The DMCA has been the law for more than a quarter century apparently without shutting down the Internet.

To be clear, the DMCA does have problems. Many sites are risk-adverse and often remove material which may not actually be infringing. Also, the person making the complaint may not in fact own the copyright or be authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder. Nonetheless, it’s fair to say the DMCA has not been a disaster for the Internet.

Requiring that Internet platforms respond to takedown notices for allegedly defamatory material would just require that they apply the same sort of scrutiny to third party content that print and broadcast media already do. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg may not be the sharpest people on earth but they can’t be that much less competent than the thousands of people running newspapers, radio, and television stations across the country. If they can police material for being defamatory, presumably Musk and Zuckerberg can figure out how to do it.

We can also structure a partial repeal to favor smaller platforms, countering in part the network effects that pushes hundreds of millions of people to the major platforms. I proposed that Section 230 protections continue to apply in their current form to platforms that do not accept advertising or sell personal information. This means that a site that is supported by subscriptions or donations could continue to operate as they do now.

I don’t know how much this sort of change would affect the Internet giants. Some people who are far more knowledgeable about the economics of the Internet than me have insisted that this change would make little difference to a Facebook or X, they would just hire more lawyers. Others insisted that they could not possibly survive with this amended Section 230 and would have to switch to a subscription model.

My guess is that it would seriously impact the giants, both because it would raise their costs and also anger the people who were seeing their posts removed. That would be a good thing in my view. But it would also mean that if Elon Musk transmits sick and defamatory lies to tens of millions of people, he can be forced to pay a price for it, and that in my view is a very good thing.

I’ll make one other point here. Many on the left (very broadly defined) seem to view it as gauche to sue for defamation. To my view, when there is a clear case of defamation like what TPO did here, public figures should sue not just for their own interest, but as a public service.

It is important to correct the record, where we can. The government does not police people for telling lies, nor should it. But we do allow private individuals to police for lies, at least when they are directly harmed by them. Bringing and winning a defamation case is a chance for a clear public record that a particular claim is in fact a lie.

The best example here is when Dominion sued Fox News for spreading lies about how its voting system had rigged the 2020 election for Biden. When Fox paid $787 million to settle the case, it was a clear statement that it was not true that Dominion voting machines were rigged for Biden. It was great to see Fox pay a steep price for spreading this lie, but even more importantly, Fox had to publicly admit it was a lie.

If Governor Walz was to sue TPO, and in a better world Elon Musk, it would be great to see them forced to admit that the former had made up a lie to defame Walz and the latter that he had profited from spreading the lie. If Walz pocketed some money in the deal, that’s fine, but we really do need to hold people accountable for spreading these types of malicious lies.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

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This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.