What is Section 230?
A law regulating web communications comes before the Supreme Court
IN JANUARY PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN took to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal to inveigh against “big-tech abuses” and suggest, among other things, an overhaul of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Mr Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, was no fan of Section 230 either. In 2020 Mr Trump ordered the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to confront “online censorship” and consider the law’s role in facilitating it. A flurry of proposals to revise Section 230 have been proposed in Congress but none has come up for a vote in either the House of Representatives or the Senate. This week the third branch of the federal government weighs in on the issue. On February 21st in Gonzalez v Google the Supreme Court will consider whether Section 230 insulates YouTube, a video platform owned by Google, from liability for algorithms that allegedly recommended terrorist-training videos. The family of Nohemi Gonzalez, an American woman who was killed in an Islamic State terrorist attack in Paris in 2015, say those those lines of code contributed to her death. What is Section 230, and why is it attracting so much criticism?
The Economist explains February 25th 2023
From the February 25th 2023 edition
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