Section 230 Is Broken: Big Tech Gets To Behave Like A Publisher While Enjoying The Immunity Of A Common Carrier

Social media is one of the greatest and most terrible forces in our society.

It has enabled mass communication across the planet on a level and scale that would’ve been unimaginable mere generations ago. It allows people to connect with distant friends and family, meet and interact with human beings on the other side of the planet in a matter of seconds, and has circumvented traditional media gatekeepers to allow every citizen to speak their mind to an audience of millions.

But along with the blessings it offers come a host of horrors: it’s almost certainly responsible for an alarming spike in rates of self-harm, depression and suicide in adolescent girls, is a major vector for spread of the social contagion of gender theory, and its dark recesses are home to a network of child predators that have resisted all efforts to expunge them.

Every one of these problems is unbelievably bad, and we haven’t even touched on issues like cancel culture, the incentivization of outrage, the Orwellian invasions of privacy or the fact that the most popular app in the world is essentially Chinese spyware. 

The most damning, the most grotesque perhaps of all the warts on this wondrous technology is the contempt of its creators for its cardinal virtue: the free flow of ideas and information.

Recent revelations have confirmed what many of us have known for years — social media giants have systematically squashed dissenting voices to further an ideological agenda, even in the absence of violations of their own stated rules. Worse, they’ve done so several times at the behest of high-ranking government officials in a gross violation of first amendment principles. 

Instead of ushering in an era of open expression and inquiry, and providing a check on power, most social media companies seem bent on shutting us down and propping the political establishment up.

This isn’t entirely unprecedented — most of the legacy media functions as an unpaid campaign arm of the Democratic Party — but it is more insidious. Social media platforms are the modern public square… for better or worse. They are where people congregate to discuss the issues of the day and elections are won and lost on them.

They’re also meant to be platforms — channels of communication, open to all, and not publishers who control what is said by whom. The New York Times might refuse to run your op-ed, but the phone company doesn’t cut your service because it doesn’t like who you’re talking to or what you have to say. But, as of now, social media gets to act like the Times while being legally treated as a common carrier.

The legislation that makes this so is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Section 230 is a basic yet vitally important law that acts as the foundation of our entire internet infrastructure. At its core, it says, 

“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.”

What does this mean in practical terms?

Suppose you’re an intrepid internet enthusiast in a world without Section 230, and you want to set up a forum where you and other like-minded people can gather to discuss why only the Original Star Wars movies are any good and why the Prequel and Sequel Trilogies qualify as crimes against humanity. 

While surveying your shiny new site, you notice that some moron has started a thread about how the Holocaust didn’t happen (but should’ve).

Not only is this untrue and grossly offensive to most people, but it also has nothing to do with the subject of the forum. Do you decide to delete the thread and suspend or even ban the offending user?

Congratulations! You are now a publisher, who is legally liable for every word on your website.

Content moderation is a full-time, soul-sucking job that can expose you to the darkest horrors found in the human heart, and paying someone to sift through every piece of user content submitted to your website can be expensive, though not quite as expensive as lawsuits or criminal prosecution — if some sicko uploads child pornography to an obscure corner of your website and you don’t notice it, that’s on you.

Managing the potential legal headaches can be a challenge even in small communities with a few hundred uploads per day. Facebook has almost 3 billion monthly users and receives 2.5 billion pieces of content per day. Even with a full-time, dedicated staff and algorithmic assistance, censoring every illegal or objectionable piece of content is a Sisyphean task — if you program a bot to auto-remove certain content, bad actors inevitably find workarounds.

Of course, you could remove nothing, and wash your hands of the matter. You may keep the servers running but the users can do anything they want, and even if it’s illegal it’s not

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