Section 230: A Primer

Posted 12/13/2025

Senator Whitehouse (D, RI) announced that he’s moving to file a bill to repeal Section 230, the singly most important piece of Internet legislation, which goes on the chopping block a few times a year. While Section 230 is flawed, repealing it without any transition plan in place would be a civil rights disaster. Many have written articles about it. This one is mine.

Who is responsible for the Internet?

The core question is who is legally liable for content posted online, and what responsibility do social media platforms carry for the content they distribute? We have two analogies to draw from:

1. A newspaper. When a newspaper publishes an article, they bear legal responsibility for distributing its contents, and can be sued for libel. Even if the article is written by someone outside the paper, the newspaper editor chose to print the article and so accepts some responsibility for its dissemination.

2. A community tack board at your local coffee shop. Anyone can walk in and tack up whatever they want on the board. The coffee shop owner does not immediately bear liability for what members of the public have put up on the wall, and shouldn’t be sued because a patron tacked up a hateful or libelous message.

So which category does the Internet fall into? When someone posts a video or comment on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and so on, does the platform bear responsibility for distributing that content to others?

Before 1996 the legal standard used to rest on whether the platform exerted editorial control. If the platform had content moderation, then they chose what to remove from their platform, and implicitly what to leave up. If the platform had no moderation whatsoever then they could claim similar immunity to a coffee shop as passive facilitators. This meant that Internet service providers were legally in the clear - they fall in the same category as phone companies or the postal service in that they facilitate your communication without being a publisher - while forums and chat rooms were treated more like newspapers. As the Internet grew, this position became untenable: a human moderator can’t approve every Tweet and YouTube video before they go live, and these services can’t exist if social media companies accept legal liability for what every user posts online.

Enter Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which clarifies:

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.

In short, platforms aren’t responsible for what their users post. There’s a short list of exceptions - platforms are required to take down material violating federal criminal law, copyright restrictions, or human trafficking law. Online services that exist to facilitate illegal transactions are also still vulnerable, so an online drug market can’t claim that they’re not responsible for all their users buying and selling drugs. But in general, this law allows social media to exist, allows any user-submitted online content to exist, and allows platforms to enact content moderation without automatically claiming legal liability for everything they host.

What’s wrong with 230?

A common critique of Section 230 is that it goes too far: platforms bear very little responsibility for the content they host, even if that content is hateful or harmful. For example, it is exceedingly difficult to sue Roblox for endangering children, even though it’s well documented that predators use their game platform to groom and harm children, because they aren’t responsible for what their players post. It is likewise very difficult to hold Meta accountable even when their own research showed that their platforms were dangerous for young people.

While Section 230 means that platforms can moderate content as they see fit, it also means that they don’t have to. The only real incentive platforms have to moderate content at all are market incentives: if a social media platform becomes a vile cesspool of hate and harassment, users may eventually flee to greener pastures that promise to keep out the Nazis. Unfortunately, switching costs are high: if I leave Twitter, I lose all my Twitter follows and followers. Even if those users have also migrated to Mastodon or Bluesky, there is not an easy way to re-establish those relationships en masse. So things have to get pretty bad for a critical mass of users to leave a platform, meaning in practice there is little pressure for the big players to moderate anything at all.

As we face more misinformation, more hate and harassment, and more AI slop online, it’s understandable that people cry out for the government to do something to pressure companies and improve our online spaces.

Why do we still need 230?

Unfortunately, simply repealing Section 230 would immediately destroy the Internet as we know it. Social media platforms like Reddit, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch could not exist. Collaborative writing projects like Wikipedia could not exist. Services like reviews on Google Maps or Yelp or Amazon could not exist, nor could Patreon or Kickstarter - any service where users contribute content could only continue to operate if a company moderator first examined the content to be sure the company wouldn’t be taking on unacceptable legal risk by distributing it. A blog like mine could survive because I don’t have a commenting system at time of writing, but that’s as close as we’d have to the Internet we know.

Technically, these platforms could continue to operate without any moderation, arguing that they’re just a passive conduit for users rather than publishers. However, given the sheer number of spam bots online, removing all moderation would also doom online platforms to collapse.

Why does this keep happening?

Every time there’s a new story about teen self-harm, or mass shooters radicalized online, or a range of other atrocities, politicians are pressured to hold social media accountable. Republicans in particular would like to target social media platforms for “censoring right-wing voices,” a largely baseless conspiracy that is impossible to pursue because companies are free to moderate content as they see fit. While social media companies usually push back against attempts to repeal 230, some larger companies see an advantage in “pulling up the ladder;” operating an army of content moderators would be exceedingly expensive for Facebook, but impossible for its smaller competitors, solidifying a permanent monopoly.

Is there any alternative?

Not an easy one. We don’t want to hold platforms legally liable for everything that users post, whether through exposing them to lawsuits or through some draconian government censorship board. For all the many flaws of social media, it is also an outlet for political and cultural expression, a platform for organizing and spreading information outside of traditional corporate media publishing, and a means of finding and building community with others. Those are ideals worth fostering.

In my opinion, one of the best courses of action is to build online platforms that are not profit-driven. A profit incentive implies keeping moderation costs down, and keeping engagement up to drive advertising revenue. This can lead (often unintentionally!) to dark patterns like encouraging radicalization and ‘hate-scrolling,’ because seeing more extreme and angry content keeps people watching. These incentives encourage lax moderation that won’t drive away users and inhibit ad money. By contrast, a community self-run platform like Mastodon has no advertising, no recommendation algorithm, and no incentive structure except wanting to provide a community space. Self-organized social media brings a host of other challenges related to content moderation and sustainable finances, but these seem to me to be more approachable than curtailing the behavior of Meta or Elon Musk through changing federal law.