This month, a video about violence in New Zealand has been uploaded on YouTube. Facebook, the owner of YouTube, blocked 1.2m of those videos before they could be viewed. Still, thousands of people saw the footage as it spread to other sites. In spite of the swift response, the question remains: why on earth do we tolerate technology that can be used to inflame hatred and normalise violence at lightning speed and global scale?

The answer lies largely in a 26-word sentence in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act passed by the US Congress in 1996. “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider,” it states. So the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter can play by different rules to traditional media companies (i.e. Financial Times) which are legally responsible for all the content they publish.

Jeff Kosseff, author of The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet, argues that Section 230 has proved an “awesome benefit” for the tech platforms. It has encouraged astonishing innovation and accelerated the growth of some of the richest companies on the planet. But it has also allowed billions of people to post anything they like online with almost no constraint. Some of that content is inspirational, much of it trivial, and a small sliver grotesque and harmful. Social networks do not discriminate.

Of course, not all countries abide by US law nor share the same extreme instinct for free speech. In New Zealand, the public censor declared the video “officially objectionable”, meaning that anyone uploading it could be jailed. Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, has argued that the tech companies should be considered “the publisher not just the postman “.

The balance between free speech and censorship must be the subject of never-ending debate, fluctuating according to social convention and law. But society has, in effect, rashly outsourced much of this debate to the tech platforms. We should not want them to become our official censors; nor do they appear capable of assuming such responsibility. But they should be in permanent dialogue with societies around the world about their rules, practices, and services.

Mr Kosseff says that Congress had two purposes in adopting Section 230. One was to promote free speech and innovation. The other was to ensure the tech companies maintained oversight of their content. “They have utterly failed on that job and did not realise that it was a two-way contract,” Mr Kosseff says. “Their services have been weaponised by bad people.” The tech companies appear belatedly to have woken up to the dangers and are trying to respond. But they still have a long way to go.

The Kosseff’s attitude towards Section 230 can be described as________.