Section 230: What Changing It Means for the Internet

Right then. You’ve probably heard politicians from both sides banging on about Section 230 lately. It’s become this sort of boogeyman that everyone blames for whatever they don’t like about the internet. But what actually is it? And what happens if we change it?

Let me break it down without the legal jargon making your eyes glaze over.

Section 230 is part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Just 26 words that basically built the internet as we know it. The key bit says that no provider of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher of information provided by another person.

Translation: if someone posts something defamatory or illegal on Facebook, Facebook isn’t legally responsible for it. The person who posted it is.

Without this protection, every website that hosts user content—and I mean everything from Twitter to Yelp to your local newspaper’s comments section—would be liable for whatever rubbish users decide to post. The legal exposure would be astronomical. Most services simply couldn’t exist.

Now here’s where it gets complicated. The same law also says platforms can moderate content—remove posts they find objectionable—without losing that protection. This is the “Good Samaritan” provision. The idea was to encourage platforms to clean up their sites without fear of being treated like a publisher.

The problem? Both political parties hate it, but for completely opposite reasons.

Republicans think platforms are censoring conservative voices and want Section 230 stripped so platforms either have to host everything or nothing. Democrats think platforms aren’t moderating enough—letting hate speech and misinformation run wild—and want them held more accountable.

It’s genuinely impressive how one law manages to upset literally everyone.

So what happens if we gut Section 230? The Electronic Frontier Foundation reckons there are two likely outcomes, neither of them good.

Option one: platforms become extremely cautious and start removing anything remotely controversial. Craigslist already nuked its entire personals section after a 2018 law (FOSTA) carved out an exception to Section 230 for sex trafficking content. Imagine that but for… well, everything.

Option two: platforms give up on moderation entirely. Why bother trying to remove bad content if you’re going to get sued anyway? Just let it all through and claim you’re not a publisher. You’d end up with the entire internet looking like 8chan.

Neither option is actually what anyone wants, which is the maddening thing about this whole debate.

The Department of Justice has proposed reforms that would require platforms to be more transparent about their moderation policies and remove certain immunities for content that violates federal law. That’s more reasonable than burning the whole thing down, but even modest changes could have massive ripple effects.

There’s also the Supreme Court case to watch. Gonzalez v. Google asked whether Section 230 protects platforms’ recommendation algorithms—the bits that suggest what content you should see next. The court punted on it for now, but this question isn’t going away.

Look, I’m not saying Section 230 is perfect. It was written in 1996 when the internet was a very different place. There were fewer than 300,000 websites then. There are over 1.7 billion now. The law probably needs updating.

But the people loudly demanding we “repeal Section 230” rarely seem to understand what that would actually mean. You can’t just delete the legal foundation of the modern internet and expect everything to sort itself out.

The boring truth is that any real reform requires careful, boring policy work. Not Twitter sound bites. Not congressional hearings designed for viral clips. Actual detailed legislation that understands how the internet works.

I won’t be holding my breath.