Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 has been interpreted to say that operators of Internet services are not to be construed as publishers (and thus not legally liable for the words of third parties who use their services."--Sholem Stein |
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Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996 (a common name for Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996) is a piece of Internet legislation in the United States, codified at Template:Usc. At its core, §230(c)(1) provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an "interactive computer service" who publish information provided by third-party users:
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.
The statute in §230(c)(2) further provides "Good Samaritan" protection from civil liability in for operators of interactive computer services in the removal or moderation of third-party material they deem obscene or offensive, even of constitutionally protected speech, as long as it is done in good faith.
Section 230 was developed in response to a pair of lawsuits against Internet service providers in the early 1990s that had different interpretations of whether the service providers should be treated as publishers or distributors of content created by its users. It was also pushed by the tech industry, and other experts, that language in the proposed CDA made providers responsible for indecent content posted by users that could extend to other types of questionable free speech. After passage of the Telecommunications Act, the CDA was challenged in courts and ruled by the Supreme Court in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union (1997) to be partially unconstitutional, leaving the Section 230 provisions in place. Since then, several legal challenges have validated the constitutionality of Section 230.
Section 230 protections are not limitless, requiring providers to still remove criminal material such as copyright infringement; more recently, Section 230 was amended by the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (FOSTA-SESTA) in 2018 to require the removal of material violating federal and state sex trafficking laws. Protections from Section 230 has come under more recent scrutiny on issues related to hate speech and ideological biases in relation to the power technology companies can hold on political discussions.
Passed at a time where Internet use was just starting to expand in both breadth of services and range of consumers in the United States, Section 230 has frequently been referred as a key law that has allowed the Internet to flourish, often referred to as "The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet".
