A case on the Supreme Court's docket could spell the end of Section 230, a law that has benefited websites and online platforms for decades. In a letter last week, two center-left organizations asked the Department of Justice (DOJ) to come to the law's defense.
The law stems from a pair of court decisions from the mid-90s, when the consumer internet was in its infancy. Taken together, the cases established that if any website moderates user-generated content, it's therefore responsible for all user content, whereas it can avoid all liability if it makes no moderation decisions whatsoever. Seeing an incentive against moderation as antithetical to the internet's potential growth, two then-congressmen drafted a law that would absolve online platforms of liability for most user-generated content. That law became known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, sometimes called "the 26 words that created the internet" because of how its straightforward applicability allowed the nascent web to grow and flourish.
