What is Section 230—and why does Trump want to change it? by abebrown716
Here’s what Section 230 is and why Trump’s proposal matters to anyone like you—someone reading these words online.“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.
"It offers a broad shield to tech companies, protecting them from lawsuits over content generated by users on their sites. It gives Twitter and Facebook the right to moderate content but does not give them the responsibility to do so. “Because content is posted on their platforms so rapidly there’s just no way they can possibly police everything,”Tech companies are not absolved from everything. They’re still required to police some types of unlawful content, such as child pornography or bootleg movies.In the 1990s, Stratton Oakmont, the brokerage founded by Jordan Belfort—yes, the guy who Leonardo DiCaprio portrayed in—sued an internet service provider, Prodigy Services, for defamation. Someone on a Prodigy-run message board had accused Stratton Oakmont of fraud. The New York State Supreme Court ruled that Prodigy had acted as a publisher and thus was liable for defamation. This case caught the attention of Wyden, then a Congressman for Oregon, who worked with California Rep. Chris Cox to include Section 230 a protection for other internet businesses from lawsuits like Stratton Oakmont’s in their Communications Decency Act of 1996. Section 230 was only a small portion of that broader legislation. The Communications Decency Act’s broader purpose was to slow the spread of child pornography on the web. The U.S. Supreme Court in a 7-2 decision struck down most of the act the following year, ruling it too great a curb on free speech. But the court kept Section 230. “A lot of people will say…that without Section 230, you wouldn’t have had the rise of social media because they would have been sued to oblivion,” says tech ethicist David Ryan Polgar,In essence, the act treats internet businesses “very similar to how we treat the Post Office,” Polgar explains. “There’s misinformation all the time that people are sending through letters, but you don’t blame the Post Office because they’re merely the conduit.”No. It’s almost impossible to overstate how wide the legislation’s reach is. Twitter and Facebook rely on it. So does Google
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