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10 December 2020

How Joe Biden Could Help Internet Companies Moderate Harmful Content

Sue Halpern

Danielle Citron, a law professor at Boston University who has studied Section 230 for more than a decade, told me that she believes Biden’s call to scrap the law was “a placeholder, a way of saying we need to have a meaningful discussion about reforming it.” When Section 230 was passed, with bipartisan support, in 1996, the Internet was primarily a collection of home pages, Listservs, and bulletin boards; Google searches, click bait, social media, online shopping (as we know it today), and YouTube did not yet exist. The previous year, though, an early online service, Prodigy, was successfully sued for defamation after a user posted untrue claims about an investment company and its president on one of Prodigy’s bulletin boards. Because Prodigy moderated the content on its sites, the court reasoned that it was acting as a publisher and was liable for the material that it hosted. In response, Christopher Cox, Republican of California, and Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, co-authored a bill in the House of Representatives that sought to indemnify Internet companies for exerting editorial control over the material that appeared on their sites. The law, Section 230, was intended to prevent the Internet from becoming home to all kinds of unsavory, offensive, and possibly illegal content—content that would drive away potential users and stifle the fledgling industry.

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