What is Section 230? A Northeastern expert explains how the 30-year-old law has shaped the web
What to know about the internet law that has shaped the web since 1996.
Thousands of social media addiction lawsuits will continue as planned, despite an attempt from Meta and YouTube to quash them before they even started.
In a recent unanimous decision, a U.S. appeals court rejected an appeal by social media companies, which argued that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunized them from lawsuits and should therefore be dismissed.
The court said that Section 230, which protects internet platforms from liability for user-generated content on their platforms, did not apply to dismiss lawsuits altogether. The law, the court said, only “provides a defense to liability — not immunity from suit.”
Elettra Bietti, a professor of law and computer science, said the court’s decision means that these companies will have to be “specific and granular’ when it comes to providing evidence to back up their claims in court.
“They can’t just say, ‘Section 230 protects me. Go away, plaintiffs,’ which is kind of what they’ve done in the past,” she said.
The lawsuits brought forth by states, school districts and individuals alleges that the social media companies intentionally designed their platforms to be addictive to users. Many of the cases are being examined in tandem as part of a legal process called multidistrict litigation, where cases are grouped together and handled by one judge.
The decision comes months after a California jury found both Meta and YouTube liable for designing features in their platforms that were addictive to youth. Specifically the court’s found that the social media sites had played a role in the mental health struggles and body dysphoria concerns of a 20-year old user. Similarly, the companies argued that Section 230 protected them from blame, but the courts did not agree.
But what exactly is Section 230 and how has it influenced the rise of the modern web?
Northeastern Global News spoke with Bietti, to learn more about its origins, how social media platforms have attempted to use the law as a shield, and how recent legal cases have reignited conversations around the provision’s merits, limits and shortcomings.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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What was the rationale behind Section 230 when it was passed?
Section 230 is a provision of the Communications Decency Act, which was passed in 1996.
Since then, Section 230 has been used by all forms of intermediaries and platforms, including Big Tech, to shield themselves from lawsuits by their users. What Section 230 does very simply is it gives immunity to platforms for any content that is posted by users of that platform. The classic example is YouTube or Facebook. You upload a video to YouTube or you post something on Facebook. That is content that is user-generated content.
So if that content violates some law, if it defames somebody, the liability related to that content can’t be assigned to the platforms. It should be assigned to the user who posted that content.
Section 230 has two parts. One part says that intermediary platforms should not be treated as publishers or speakers of any of the content posted on their forum.
The second part is what is called the Good Samaritan position, which is basically if the platforms take action — if they put in place recommender systems or if they promote a certain type of content moderation policy — those kinds of actions are meant to make the forum more palatable and more pleasant to users and they are part of their functions as intermedinaries.
How have social media companies in the past tried to use the law to protect themselves?
Any form of liability that you could try and impute on a platform, platforms have tried to respond to by arguing that Section 230 immunizes them from liability.
How has the conversation around Section 230 changed given the current lawsuits and the cases where both Meta and YouTube were found liable on charges that they had designed their platforms to be addictive?
There’s been a lot of debate and discussion around Section 230 for at least the past five years. So it’s not a new issue that suddenly has popped up as a new topic. During COVID, there were a lot of questions about whether to reform Section 230. It partly became a bipartisan issue, which was related to the pushback to Big Tech.
We have not seen any reforms to Section 230 that have succeeded in any way, and something that we have seen recently is the rise of this outrage against addictive tech and harms against children and teenagers. In light of some of these pressures, there has been a lot of litigation. … For a long time, the boundaries of Section 230 were very murky, and it was unclear exactly what kind of platform behavior would ever be scrutinized, and increasingly there is a willingness on the parts of the courts to look under the hood and actually think about this type of behavior as something we want to scrutinize regardless of whether it’s technically covered by the language of Section 230.
What are some proposed ways to reform Section 230?
One way to think about reform is to think about the way Europeans do this. They have a notice-and-take-down system, similar to the copyright regime that exists in the United States. So if a user is being harassed online because of third-party X or Y, they can notify the platform, and the platform has an obligation to take reasonable steps. The (U.S.) could pass a law that says you have to respond to the user within the next two hours or within the next day. And if the content is not removed, then you may be liable.
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