Trump has signed an executive order targeting social media companies. It centers on Section 230, a fragment of law that underpins much of today’s internet. Here's a rundown of what the law is, what’s at stake, and what the order might accomplish:
Section 230 is a small piece of the 1996 Telecommunications Act that has, in many ways, created the internet we all use today.Its first part states ,“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.”
There are some existing exceptions to those protections. According to the original law, they don’t apply to violations of federal criminal law, intellectual property law, or the Electronic Privacy Communications Act — this is why YouTube tries to take down copyrighted material, for instance, and companies try to respond quickly to reports of child pornography, which is a federal crime.
Christopher Cox, a former Reagan appointee who was then serving as a Republican congressman in Orange County, teamed up with Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, who has since become that state’s senior U.S. senator, to fix that problem and incentivize websites to police themselves. Section 230 was their solution.Even after its passage into law, Section 230 could have resulted in a very different internet than the one we know today, said, professor of cybersecurity law at the U.S.
But the first case to test Section 230 after its passage led to an even broader set of protections for websites. A judge in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that even being a distributor was just a special subset of being a publisher or speaker, and Section 230 made clear that websites were neither.
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