 Section 230 has become the single most important law shaping online platforms. In simple terms, it's the law that protects services if a user posts something illegal. But as these services have become bigger and more controversial, people are more seriously calling for the law to change. If you have any kind of problem with Facebook or YouTube, somebody's probably proposed fixing it by changing Section 230. And as pressure in Congress builds, those fixes could have huge consequences for the rest of the internet. When 230 is created, it is created by people newly creating this nascent internet. Our laws shouldn't remain stagnant as they were 25 years ago. It doesn't mean we get rid of them, it means we change them. So let's talk about how we got here. In the mid-90s, a lot of the internet was message boards. Some tiny and independent, others on bigger services like CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL. And when a user posted something libelous or otherwise illegal, a couple of court rulings effectively punished companies for moderating content. They basically said that if a site took down some posts, it could become legally responsible for other posts, while just letting a service run wild could keep companies out of trouble. Loanmakers thought this was a bad idea. So when they passed the Communications Decency Act in 1996, they included Section 230 to settle the question. The first part says that interactive computer services—apps, websites, newspaper comment sections, AOL, and so on—can't be legally treated as the publisher of their users' posts. The second part says you can't sue a platform for good-faith moderation efforts. Overall, the point is simple. When a site or app accepts user-generated content, it typically doesn't accept liability for that content, no matter how it moderates. A lot of conservative politicians have gotten this wrong, claiming there are separately regulated categories of platforms and publishers, and that moderation makes you a publisher with more legal liability. In reality, Section 230 was literally written so this wouldn't happen. So some of these same politicians have tried to roll back or abolish Section 230 to change this, trying to make it tougher for sites to suspend users like former President Donald Trump. As you know, I have long been concerned about Twitter's pattern of censoring and silencing individual Americans. Why do you block anything? Well, we have policies that are focused on making sure that more voices on the platform are possible. We see a lot of abuse and harassment, which ends up silencing people and having them leave from the platform. Now, the First Amendment also says companies probably don't have to publish speech they don't like, including Trump posts. But Section 230 makes it easier to fight a potentially expensive lawsuit. When Democrats like current President Joe Biden talk about abolishing Section 230, though, they're usually referring to a more complicated problem. If somebody slanders you in a YouTube video or criminally harasses you on Facebook, Section 230 says you should sue or prosecute the original offender, not the platform that hosts them. But on an internet with billions of users, troll mobs and automated systems can spread this content really fast, and going after each user is almost impossible. Lots of Democrats and some Republicans want sites to take a more active role in policing illegal content. And they think that right now, Section 230 lets companies escape responsibility. I just think that social media has to be more socially conscious of what is important in terms of our democracy. I for one think we should be considering taking away the exemption that they cannot be sued for knowingly engaged on promoting something that's not true. Trusting that they will be regulated into actually caring about the problems of hate speech is, in my opinion, a very silly wicket if you're going to do it by a 230. The internet's issues are way bigger than Section 230. To explore them, The Verge held a panel discussion with the general counsels of the Wikimedia Foundation and Vimeo, as well as writer and researcher Sedet Harry. They laid out the complex problems that any legal reform would have to deal with, and the potential impact of getting it wrong. No amount of Section 230 reform is going to fix the fact that the First Amendment also protects a lot of speech online. Even if you took away Section 230 today, you're still not going to be able to sue platforms for misinformation about the election, misinformation about vaccines, things that are hateful to minority groups. But if you look at the people who actually do sue for things like defamation, it's generally the people in power. It's not the people out of power. And so by removing Section 230 protections, do you privilege those people over people who can't afford a lawyer and will never sue you anyway? I think you probably do. It just becomes the billion dollar tech companies throwing money around to silence whoever's going to be a problem. And no matter what, if it goes to money and law, the people will lose. And that is the worst possible outcome. These issues go way beyond quote unquote big tech. There are smaller sites that basically exist just to promote harassment, non-consensual pornography and other criminal behavior. And right now, Section 230 protects them along with every other site on the internet. But a lot of companies, nonprofits and ordinary people are just trying to run a site or app in good faith. And changing Section 230 could catch them in the crossfire. Are you going to create a situation where you need, you know, a so-called army of moderators to deal with the problem? Because if so, I think you risk entrenching the large players like Facebook and others because they already do have virtually limited resources and can deal with the issue. So far, Congress has introduced some potential changes and they basically fall into two categories. The first is making sites earn Section 230 protections. The PACT Act, for instance, says that sites need to publish a clear moderation policy, they need to remove illegal content within 24 hours of hearing about it, and they need to staff a phone helpline with actual human beings. The PACT Act also includes a small site exemption, so it could theoretically have a smaller impact on the internet. The second category is limiting what kind of content Section 230 covers. That's the goal of the new Safe Tech Act, which adds liability for a bunch of different offending content, including harassment and wrongful death. But when Congress has limited protections before, it's often accidentally created more problems. I really worry about the kind of abuse if there was overly broad restrictions on people's ability to host what is actually knowledge. I would want to make sure that any intervention was narrowly and specifically tailored without creating some of the kind of unintended consequences for real people that have made real people less safe. Section 230 doesn't cover copyright infringement, for instance. So sites have created takedown systems and automated filters to catch pirated content. But trolls abuse these systems to censor users, and the flagging systems make a lot of mistakes. And that is the crux of this, is that the same things that protect us, the same things that enable harm against us are intertwined. And that is what we're teasing out. And I am not comfortable with any discussion that pretends we will solve the problems of people or solve the problems of democracy with a large opening, one size fits all discussion. Section 230 often gets looked at as the only tool in the toolbox. If privacy is our concern, we should focus on privacy laws. If it's data security, we should focus on data security laws. I worry about locking in sort of the technology of, you know, 2021. Frankly, I don't think we're where we've got it right. The internet has real problems. And since Section 230 helped create the internet as we know it, you can blame it for some of them. But Section 230 also helped create a lot of what we love about the internet. So as lawmakers try to change it, the real question is whether good intentions will translate into good results. I ordered some potatoes. This is my fault, not the online company. This is what I received three potatoes of this size. These kinds of things have happened to me often. I take the blame. We know that the virtues of technology have helped us very much get through this pandemic. But at the same time, there's so much we need to fix.