full of, well…

-The most hardcore, perverse types of pornography.

The images came from the Internet. Exon wanted his fellow senators to realize

what kids could see…

-Come by my desk and take a look at this disgusting material.

…with just the click of a button.

-It's certainly not hard to find. And, I was just like, Dad, get a load of this.

In the mid-90s, Americans debated how to handle all kinds of objectionable content on the web,

including hate speech and defamation. Out of that debate came a law that helped

create the modern Internet, and now both Republicans and Democrats want it changed. It's called:

-Section 230. -Section 230 should be revoked.

But what does that law actually do? And what would happen to the Internet if we changed it?

The thing to remember about the 90s is…

-On your mark, get set, we're riding on the Internet.

...the Internet was young and few people really understood it.

-Allison, can you explain what Internet is?

It seemed cool.

-It's very hip to be on the Internet right now.

-Now that I'm on the Internet, I'd rather be on my computer than doing just about anything.

It's really cool.

But we hadn't agreed on what to do with all the objectionable content, or if we should

do anything. James Exon, the senator with the porn binder, wanted the government to

clean up the Internet by effectively making indecent material like porn illegal online.

-And so he proposed an amendment to the Telecommunications Act called

the Decency Act, the Communications Decency Act.

But two members of Congress, Christopher Cox and Ron Wyden, thought that companies would

do a better job cleaning the Internet up themselves. There was just one big legal problem.

-There were court cases that perversely made, uh, Internet, uh, providers liable if they

tried to exercise editorial discretion, keep, uh, smut off the Internet, and so on.

At the time, courts held that Internet providers like Prodigy, which moderated some user content,

were potentially liable for anything their users posted. So the companies faced a choice:

clean up their websites and risk getting sued, or go totally hands off and face no legal consequences.

Cox and Wyden didn't like that.

-That is backwards. We want to encourage people like Prodigy, like Compuserve, like America

Online, like the new Microsoft Network to do everything possible for us the customer

to help us control what comes in and what our children see.

So Cox and Wyden wrote a provision, Section 230, that let companies moderate content without

being on the legal hook for it. Their hope was that Internet companies would, in good

faith, police objectionable content on the Web.

We came to call it the sword and the shield. And the sword is the ability to take down

horrible stuff on the Internet. The shield is the protection from frivolous litigation.

Section 230 was added to Senator Exon's Communications Decency Act, and the whole

thing passed in 1996. But then Exon's porn ban ran into one big wall: the First Amendment.

Free speech advocates are hailing a ruling: the U.S. government cannot enforce the Communications Decency Act without violating the constitutional right to free speech.

-You, you probably guessed that because, uh, there's — Spoiler alert,

there's porn on the Internet.”

But the courts let Section 230 stand. And that little law created a massive industry.

-So, you think about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, even Wikipedia. None of these business models

could exist in their current forms if the platforms had to defend in court the veracity

of every single thing that people post.

The story of Section 230 is the story of the Internet: more and more people posting what

they want online, and websites not getting sued for it because of their legal shield.

The dark side of that story started pretty early: in 1995, when an anonymous user on

AOL impersonated a man named Kenneth Zeran and used his name and phone number to sell

T-shirts glorifying the Oklahoma City bombing.

-At the time, it was a fairly novel approach of, really, ruining someone's life.

After receiving a tsunami of threatening phone calls, Zeran begged AOL to take down the anonymous

user's ads.

-They, for a while, would take them down. But then they stopped listening to him. He

was annoying. They just moved on.

Zeran sued AOL in 1996. But the court said Section 230 allowed AOL to leave up the posts

even after Zeran reported them. AOL got to use Section 230's shield, in other words,

without ever having to touch its sword.

-It becomes, effectively, the law of the land. You could keep up the content no matter how

horrific, how defamatory it is, and you are not going to be liable for it.

Carrie Goldberg is a lawyer who says the broad immunity Section 230's shield gives Internet

companies has made some of them lazy and irresponsible.

-Section 230 is not a law that protects free speech. Section 230 is a law that protects

an industry.

Four years ago, her client, Matthew Herrick, was impersonated by a vengeful ex-boyfriend

on the dating app, Grindr.

-He would create profiles using Matthew's picture and his name and then send unwitting

people to Matthew's home and to his job to have sex with Matthew.

-Matthew Herrick says for months he couldn't go to the restaurants where he waited tables,

or his home, without men he didn't know approaching him for sex or drugs.

-Matthew was receiving sometimes 23 people in person at his home. And often, Matthew's

ex would say that Matthew was into rape fantasies. So he was setting Matthew up to be sexually

assaulted.

-Herrick said he filed 50 reports with Grindr and the company never did anything.

-We were suing them ultimately for, uh, releasing a dangerous product onto the marketplace.

But the court said that, just like in the Zeran-AOL case, Grindr didn't have to help Herrick.

It was, in my opinion, the most expansive and extravagant interpretation of Section 230 to date.

Goldberg thinks that Section 230 should be changed or revoked so people like Herrick

could sue for Internet companies' negligence.

Everybody should have the right to be able to sue somebody or a company who has harmed you

or is continuing to harm you. And so I see this not as a speech issue, but an access

to justice issue.

You know, why do these harms happen? It's a combination of the perpetrator and the platform.

Site operators should only enjoy immunity from liability if they're engaged in reasonable

content moderation practices. Right, there here has to be an exchange, like, you get

the legal shield, but you've got to do something.

Today, Section 230 has helped create an Internet industry worth more than a trillion dollars.

Section 230 is how these companies have gotten big, it's how they've gotten powerful,

it's how they've gotten rich.

And agreeing on what it would mean for these companies to use Section 230's sword and

shield responsibly has gotten harder. It depends on what you think the problem is. Democrats

want companies like Facebook to do more policing of disinformation.

Because it is not merely an internet company. It is propagating falsehoods they know to

be false

But some Republicans claim there's a different problem: censorship of conservative views.

And they want to change or scrap Section 230 to make Internet companies do less policing.

The Big Tech oligarchs have declared war on the Republican Party and conservatives.

I think it's time that we consider the outright repeal of Section 230.

Tweaking Section 230 might help individual victims of abuse like Matthew Herrick, and

it could make Internet companies more accountable for the way they moderate content. But defenders

of the law say that changing it too much could undermine people's freedom to post what

they want online.

What I think we need are changes that are very carefully tailored and that address a

particular harm and that also consider, how do we address this harm without just sort

of, um, causing total chaos to the existing Internet that we know?