Thirty years ago today, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a bill credited with creating the groundwork for the modern internet, became law and set off a chain of events that would make it a lightning rod for the techlash.
The statute has survived everything from the dot-com bubble to a Supreme Court challenge that struck down the surrounding text in the CDA. But as it marks this major milestone, Section 230 is facing what could be among its biggest threats to date, as prominent lawmakers plot to bring it down and a mountain of legal challenges give courts the chance to narrow its scope.
Section 230, once dubbed “the twenty-six words that created the internet,” reads: “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.” In other words, online platforms that host user-generated content can’t be held responsible for what those users choose to say on their platforms. Its “Good Samaritan” provision allows for those platforms to moderate content in good faith, shielding them from civil liability for blocking access to obscene, violent, or harassing content. The law does not shield platforms from claims under criminal law.
In the years since President Bill Clinton signed the broader Telecommunications Act of 1996, Section 230 has become practically a caricature. Depending who you ask, it may either be at the root of most harm perpetuated by social media platforms or the very thing keeping the internet afloat. What started as an extremely popular act to prevent a fledgling tech industry from being crushed under the weight of frivolous lawsuits about hosting user-generated content has become one of the most reviled laws among many members of Congress — some of whom voted for it in the first place.
“As minority leader in the house in 1996, I voted for it because social media platforms told us that without that protection, America would never have an internet economy. They also said that the platforms were just a dumb pipe that just carried content produced by others,” former Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-MO) said in a press conference last week that featured actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt alongside parents who lost kids following harms they say were facilitated by internet platforms, from sextortion to fentanyl poisoning. They were gathered to advocate for a bill introduced by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to sunset Section 230 in two years, with the hope it will force lawmakers and tech companies to finally break the status quo and put them under pressure to come up with workable reforms.
At the time of his vote, Gephardt says, lawmakers had no idea what algorithms were and how they would come to capture people’s attention for hours on end and “brainwash” them. Armed with new knowledge about the technology, he says, it’s time to “correct the action that I and many others made 30 years ago.”
Now would be “the worst possible time to repeal Section 230”
Gephardt’s sentiment about Section 230 may be widely shared, but it also faces stiff opposition. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a co-author of the law whose name was attached to the amendment that would become known as Section 230, doesn’t see the law as a mistake. In fact, he tells The Verge in a phone interview, now would be “the worst possible time to repeal Section 230.”
“Trump and the MAGA billionaire cronies would be in the driver’s seat to rewrite our laws over online speech,” Wyden warns, saying it would be like “handing [Trump] a grenade launcher pointed right at people who want to have a voice.” While many Section 230 opponents think of platforms like Instagram and YouTube as the behemoth players they believe have benefited too long from the law’s protections, Wyden says platforms like Bluesky and Wikipedia, and groups that use social media to monitor the actions of ICE, would also suffer without it. Thirty years later, he says, “the law stands for exactly the same thing, which is: Are you going to stand up for people who don’t have power, don’t have clout, and are looking for a way to be heard? Because the people at the top, the people with lots of money, they’re always going to have ways to get their message out and to get their content out. And the First Amendment and what we’re talking about is a lifeline for folks of modest kind of means.”
Wyden recalls cooking up the text that would become Section 230 with former Rep. Chris Cox (R-CA) over lunch “in a little cubby where members of Congress could grab a sandwich and complain about the world.” The bill would help resolve a concerning trend that rose out of a pair of recent legal cases: Courts were finding that online platforms could be held liable for what users posted on them if they made any effort to remove or limit posts they found objectionable, but so long as they did nothing at all, they might escape accountability.
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