Section 230 Is Under Attack (Again)

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Once again, lawmakers are threatening to strip tech companies of their legislative sword and shield. Section 230, also known as the twenty-six words that made the internet, is a small section of the Communications Decency Act that protects social media platforms from legal liability when making decisions around users’ posts. (It protects a website like Yelp, for instance, from being sued over defamatory reviews written by its users.) When Section 230 was first enacted, in 1996, it attracted bipartisan support, with the intention of helping struggling websites to grow. But as tech companies developed enormous power and influence, lawmakers started to argue that the provision gives platforms too much immunity. As such, Section 230 has become a frequent target for legislative change. I wrote about some of these calls before Christmas, while noting that it wasn’t yet clear exactly where the new administration stood on the question. 

Last week, The Information reported that a new bipartisan bill will seek to sunset Section 230 entirely—that is, unless tech companies agree to accept new rules. The bill, which could still be introduced as early as this week, is being spearheaded by Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, and Dick Durbin, a Democratic senator from Illinois. If it goes into effect, Section 230 will expire on January 1, 2027—and turn the internet as we know it on its head. To avoid potential lawsuits, some platforms may stop hosting user-generated content altogether. Others may try to moderate much more aggressively. 

This isn’t either Durbin’s or Graham’s first stab at Section 230. They have both expressed concern in the past that it doesn’t do enough to protect kids from harm online. In 2020, Graham pushed a bill titled EARN IT, which sought to amend Section 230 such that platforms would have to “earn” legal protection by showing that they are following recommendations for combating child sexual exploitation. (The bill didn’t go anywhere; it was reintroduced in 2022 and 2023, but was again unsuccessful.) Durbin, for his part, proposed the STOP CSAM Act, a bill that amends Section 230 to allow victims of child exploitation to sue online platforms. It passed unanimously through the Senate Judiciary Committee but was blocked by Ron Wyden, one of the coauthors of Section 230, who argued that the legislation would result in tech companies weakening or completely removing their encryption safeguards to avoid legal action, which would inadvertently hurt children. 

Despite this legacy of past failures to kill Section 230, the new bill’s support from across the political aisle may put it on firmer footing. Republicans Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn and Democrats Sheldon Whitehouse and Amy Klobuchar have agreed to cosponsor it, per The Information. Not that supporters of different parties necessarily share the same objectives here: Jess Miers, a visiting assistant professor at the University of Akron School of Law, argues in Techdirt that Democrats may be supporting the bill out of an assumption that repealing Section 230 will force tech companies to engage in more content moderation when, in reality, that is far from guaranteed. Indeed, Brendan Carr, the new head of the Federal Communications Commission, has argued that platforms should only be granted protection under Section 230 if they severely limit content moderation so as to only remove user-generated content that is illegal. By joining forces with Republican lawmakers to repeal Section 230, Miers argues, Democrats are “handing the Trump Administration a powerful tool to execute its long-standing goal: total control over online discourse.”

Other critics of reforming Section 230 say that lawmakers are turning it into a scapegoat when, in reality, problems with the way the internet works do not stem from a single law. “No amount of Section 230 reform is going to fix the fact that the First Amendment also protects a lot of speech online,” Michael Cheah, a member of the adjunct faculty at the University of Miami School of Law, told The Verge in 2020. In a more recent piece for The Verge, published earlier this month, Wyden, the coauthor of Section 230, similarly wrote that lawmakers give Section 230 too much credit: “While it’s a cornerstone of internet speech, it’s a lesser support compared to the First Amendment, as well as Americans’ own choices in what they want to see online.”

Wyden concluded, nonetheless, that Section 230 is “just as necessary today” as in 1996. Without its protections, platforms would face increased liability risks for any attempts at moderation, which could result in prolonged legal battles and costly fees to defend themselves, even if they win. While major players like Meta and Google may be able to absorb these costs, it could be devastating for smaller fish in the internet pool, such as blogs, nonprofits, and newer social media sites. Bluesky and Wikipedia, for instance, may not be able to write big checks to lawyers every time they get dragged to court. Ironically, the big platforms that attract most of the negative media coverage—and thus the ire of Section 230 critics—may be in better shape to deal with the consequences of its weakening. 

According to The Information, lawmakers claim that they don’t intend to fully dismantle Section 230; instead, the proposed repeal seems primarily to be a bargaining tool to bring tech companies to the negotiating table. If that goal is achieved, it remains unclear what specific regulatory demands would be made, but they could very well mirror aspects of the legislation previously proposed by Graham and Durbin. As Miers points out, however, introducing wiggle room into Section 230 could be exploited in ways that lawmakers don’t intend. “Repealing Section 230 won’t lead to the ‘better’ Internet that Democrats envision,” she writes. “It will pave the way for the most powerful voices to dominate the conversation and make sure those who speak out against them can’t fight back.” 

Other notable stories:

• The saga of Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, inadvertently adding Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, to a group chat in which top officials coordinated air strikes on Yemen continued yesterday after The Atlantic decided to publish sensitive messages from the chat that it had initially withheld; the magazine said that repeated (and credulity-defying) administration claims that no classified information was shared in the chat—and that The Atlantic was lying—led it to conclude that “people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions.” Meanwhile, Wired reported that Waltz’s friend list on Venmo, the payment app, was public. (The American Prospect noted that it was full of journalists.) And the German magazine Der Spiegel found private contact details—and even passwords—for Waltz and other top officials floating around online.

• Also yesterday, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia congresswoman, told a British journalist to “go back to your country” after she attempted to ask Greene about the group chat scandal. Earlier, Greene had convened a hearing of her “DOGE”-branded House subcommittee with top officials at the public broadcasters NPR and PBS, for the purpose of bashing the outlets as radically left-wing and calling for them to be stripped of public funds. (“We believe that you all can hate on us on your own dime,” she said.) In response, the leaders of the broadcasters characterized the services they provide as vital, particularly in “rural communities where commercial media typically don’t operate because it isn’t lucrative,” Liam Scott, who covered the hearing for CJR, reports.

• On Tuesday, plainclothes government agents seized Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national and Fulbright scholar who was studying at Tufts University on a student visa, off the street in Somerville, Massachusetts. (“It looked like a kidnapping,” a neighbor said.) Ozturk appears to be the latest victim of a broader Trump administration crackdown on students connected to Palestine solidarity protests on college campuses; she reportedly was not a leading figure in such protests at Tufts, but did coauthor an op-ed in a student newspaper last year criticizing the school’s response to them. Ozturk’s visa has apparently been canceled, and she is reportedly now being detained in Louisiana.

• Last week, Martin Varsavsky, a tech entrepreneur and board member at Axel Springer, the German media giant that owns Politico, slammed an article in the publication as pro-Hamas and its reporters as “woke.” (He reportedly didn’t realize that the article was a wire story written by the Associated Press.) Now the Financial Times reports that Varsavsky is gone from Axel Springer’s board; his departure was planned as part of a corporate maneuver, but company officials reportedly weighed firing him early after his recent remarks. He took a parting shot at Politico’s “ethical standards” on the way out.

• And for CJR, Laurent Richard—the founder of Forbidden Stories, a French-based group that aims to continue the work of murdered or otherwise threatened reporters around the world as a means both of solidarity and protection—argues that as press threats rise in the US and elsewhere, collaborative journalism is the only answer. “We must move from the ‘lone wolf’ model to that of partnership,” he writes, and work “with colleagues who were yesterday our competitors, creating and respecting common rules, and sometimes setting our egos aside. It stings a bit at first to coordinate, but you get used to it.”

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