Even though it’s only 26 words long, Section 230 doesn’t say what many think it does.
So we’ve decided to take up a few kilobytes of the Internet to explain what, exactly, people are getting wrong about the primary law that defends the Internet.
Section 230 (47 U.S.C. § 230) is one of the most important laws protecting free speech online. While its wording is fairly clear—it states that "
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 is still widely misunderstood. Put simply, the law means that although you are legally responsible for what you say online, if you host or republish other peoples' speech, only those people are legally responsible for what they say.
But there are many, many misconceptions–as well
as misinformation from Congress and elsewhere–about Section 230, from
who it affects and
what it protects to what results a repeal would have. To help explain what’s actually at stake when we talk about Section 230, we’ve put together responses to several common misunderstandings of the law.
Let’s start with a breakdown of the law, and the protections it creates for you.
How Section 230 protects free speech:
Without Section 230, the Internet would be a very different place, one with fewer spaces where we’re all free to speak out and share our opinions.
One of the Internet’s most important functions is that it allows people everywhere to connect and share ideas—whether that’s on blogs, social media platforms, or educational and cultural platforms like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. Section 230 says that any site that hosts the content of other “speakers”—from writing, to videos, to pictures, to code that others write or upload—is not liable for that content, except for some important exceptions for violations of federal criminal law and intellectual property claims.
Section 230 makes only the speaker themselves liable for their speech, rather than the intermediaries through which that speech reaches its audiences. This makes it possible for sites and services that host user-generated speech and content to exist, and allows users to share their ideas—without having to create their own individual sites or services that would likely have much smaller reach. This gives many more people access to the content that others create than they would ever have otherwise, and it’s why we have flourishing online communities where users can comment and interact with one another without waiting hours, or days, for a moderator, or an algorithm, to review every post.
And Section 230 doesn’t only allow sites that host speech, including controversial views, to exist. It allows them to exist without putting their thumbs on the scale by censoring controversial or potentially problematic content. And because what is considered controversial is often shifting, and context- and viewpoint- dependent, it’s important that these views are able to be shared. “Defund the police” may be considered controversial speech today, but that doesn’t mean it should be censored. “Drain the Swamp,” “Black Lives Matter,” or even “All Lives Matter” may all be controversial views, but censoring them would not be beneficial.
