The Communications Decency Act turns 30 this year. Are attempts to reform it too little, too late?
No one could have predicted in 1996 what role the Internet would have on daily life in 2026. At the time the Communications Decency Act was enacted, the Web was, well, limited. Today, kids can’t do their homework without a Chromebook and a WiFi connection. Legislation hasn’t kept pace, to say the least.
For the uninitiated, section 230 is a provision in the Communications Decency Act that provides broad immunity for Internet platforms. In other words: Social networks can’t be held responsible for the content their users post. This is controversial because their proprietary algorithms accelerate the spread of harmful content like hate speech, CSAM (child sex abuse material), and false information.
Attorneys who specialize in internet law have long been critical of section 230, particularly since the 2016 election when fake news took over Facebook feeds and influenced voter perception at an unprecedented scale. The hashtag #Repeal230 emerged in 2019 between the legal profession, Big Tech critics, and activists. Though views are modest, the continued debate and enduring public criticism have resulted in a rare bipartisan attempt at reform.
Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, accused “Big Tech” of abusing Section 230 protections to collaborate with the government to censor political speech. However, he’s not advocating for a full repeal of the law. “I’m concerned that a full repeal or sunset would lead platforms to engage in worse behavior — to engage in more censorship to protect themselves from litigation,” Cruz said.
Conversely, Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, argued that the law in its current form shields companies from accountability for “egregious harms, harassment and abuse, frauds and scams” against children. We don’t simply have to accept terrible outcomes as a fact of modern life,” Schatz stated, calling claims that the law cannot be modernized “preposterous.”
Today, two questions are forcing a debate that cannot be delayed any longer: Should Section 230 protect generative AI and algorithmic platform design?
Brad Carson, president of Americans for Responsible Innovation, testified that generative AI models should not receive liability protection if their outputs cause real-world harm. Generative AI systems do not fit that model — a user provides a prompt, but the company designs the model, selects the training data, fine-tunes the system and deploys it with parameters of its choosing,” Carson said.
It’s no longer possible to pretend that AI has a tremendous impact on the general public. The same goes for social media platforms, which used to be optional, and are now treated as infrastructure for civic discourse like newspapers and townhall meetings. And it’s impossible to overstate how this scale drives profit motive for social media companies.
Matthew Bergman, founding attorney at the Social Media Victims Law Center, who represented parents whose children died by suicide after prolonged social media engagement, argued that tech companies improperly use Section 230 to defend predatory business practices. “These cases have nothing to do with protecting speech, they’re about deliberate design decisions of companies to prioritize profits over the lives and safety of children,” Bergman testified.
Despite bipartisan calls for reform, several First Amendment experts warned that dismantling the statute could devastate the Internet.
Daphne Keller, director of the Platform Regulation Program at Stanford University Law School, cautioned that eliminating the shield “would very likely make the internet worse for user speech rights without making it any safer” and would disproportionately harm smaller tech rivals.
This argument sounds nice in theory. Section 230 allows tech giants to host incendiary content at scale and promote it with their own algorithms, leading to massive profits and making it impossible for these smaller rivals to compete.
Nadine Farid Johnson, policy director at the Knight First Amendment Institute, suggested an alternative. Rather than stripping platforms of their liability shield, Farid Johnson recommended conditioning Section 230 protections on strict compliance with new interoperability, privacy, and transparency mandates to attack monopoly control over public discourse.
Specific legislation was introduced as a result of the hearing. Cruz mentioned an upcoming bill aimed at preventing government agencies from pressuring platforms to remove user speech. The Sunset Section 230 Act, introduced by Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., would fully repeal the statute and strip platforms of their liability shield. The Algorithm Accountability Act by Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah dictates that a platform failing to uphold a standard “duty of care” will lose its Section 230 protections. Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., introduced the Collude Act, which seeks to strip social media companies of Section 230 protections and create a private right of action if they violate users’ First Amendment rights through content moderation. A bipartisan bill backed by Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, aimed at reforming Section 230 to require more accountability from tech platforms.
Will any of it be enough?
