More than 20 proposals to update Section 230 have surfaced on the Hill, originating from both sides of the aisle. Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and John Thune (R-S.D.), plan to reintroduce one of them, the PACT Act, in the coming weeks, says Sen. Thune. A competing bill was recently proposed by a trio of Democratic U.S. senators on Feb. 5. Its intention, as its backers wrote, is to make social-media companies accountable for enabling cyberstalking, targeted harassment and discrimination."

There is broad agreement among experts and politicians that Section 230 wont be eliminated, but thats where accord ends. While many believe an update of the law is necessary and imminent, many others think most attempts to alter it are dangerous. And despite a flurry of ideas for modernizing the law, its not clear where it falls in Congresss priorities in light of all the other challenges facing the country.

The heads of some Big Tech companies, notably Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg (in October) and Microsofts Satya Nadella (on Wednesday) have said they welcome more clarity on what sort of speech should be allowed under Section 230. Meanwhile, Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey on Tuesday proposed a more market-driven" approach to addressing the desire to update Section 230. Even if legislation is passed, its not clear exactly what sort of cases will be brought to test the updated law, or what precedents those decisions will establish. And hashing it out in the courts could take years.

Section 230 touches on everything from election integrity to online social-media bias," says Klon Kitchen, who was until recently director of the Center for Technology Policy at the politically conservative Heritage Foundation. If we try to solve all the problems of the internet by making changes to this one law, he adds, well be overwhelmed by their unintended consequences.

Passed in 1996, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was explicitly intended to protect and promote Americas then-nascent internet industry. It is the foundational covenant between the state and internet platforms. It goes, roughly, like this: As long as sites arent knowingly helping their users commit crimes, what users share on these sites is the users own responsibility. Section 230 makes the business models of giants including Facebook and Google possible. Its the reason upstarts and competitors to these giants, from TikTok and MeWe to Parler and Gab, can exist. And it enables countless other businesses, too, such as Airbnb.

Much has changed since 1996. Then, there were 36 million people on the internet, most of them in the U.S. Now there are 4.8 billion, including 90% of Americans. And according to a survey by Pew published in July, 72% of U.S. adults say social-media companies have too much power and influence in politics.

Given the tech industrys power to determine what information we consumeand the apparent protection from scrutiny or recourse that Section 230 providesits no wonder a long and bipartisan list of politicians, appointed officials and career bureaucrats are concerned about the law.

Many Democrats are worried that platforms have used the protections of Section 230 as an excuse to let some kinds of speech run rampant; many Republicans believe theyve used it to police speech too much. Some want to add clarifying language to Section 230, while others want carve-outs," which make it explicit that companies only receive liability protections if they play by certain rules. A few, including Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), want Section 230gutted.

One of the reasons that hasnt happened is when legislators look at the implications of that, that juice isnt worth the squeeze," says Mr. Kitchen. The potential negative ramifications of wiping out Section 230 without having an adequate replacement would be considerable, and could seriously damage the U.S. economy, he adds.

Reverting to their pre-1996 legal status would mean websites and apps that act to moderate content in any way would be responsible for everything they host and disseminate. Services like Facebook and YouTube would either have to stop moderating and open the floodgates to spam, hate speech and other harmful content, or moderate and be potentially crushed by individual and class-action lawsuits for harms arising from what their users post. Most likely, theyd have to drastically narrow the scope and volume of whats permitted on their platforms.

For users on Twitter or Instagram, this could mean hitting share" and then hoping your post makes it past an army of automated filters and human reviewers that would put existing hurdles to shame. Meanwhile, someone would have to vet and vouch for every Google search result and Airbnb listing ahead of time. If this poses a crushing burden for Americas trillion-dollar tech behemoths, it would be infinitely worse for startups entering the industry.

Given that, most proposals focus on upgrading and expanding Section 230, not blowing it out an airlock.

Sens. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) proposed the SAFE TECH Act earlier this month. It does not appear to be the sort of bill that any Republicans will be eager to cosign. A grab bag of a half dozen proposals, it makes platforms liable for both ads they run and harassment they enable, and would allow (for example) Rohingya survivors to sue Facebook in U.S. court for what the United Nations has alleged is the companys role in the Myanmar genocide.

The act also incorporates changes to Section 230 proposed by legal scholars such as George Washington University law professor and former Obama administration Justice Department official Spencer Overton. He recommended a carve-out that would force online platforms to obey federal civil-rights laws. This would mean, among other things, platforms could not allow content or advertising intended to suppress voting by protected groups.

In addition, the bill would change what Section 230 protects from information" to speech," something proposed by law professors Danielle Keats Citron, of The University of Virginia, and Mary Anne Franks, of the University of Miami. This change would put all sorts of conduct outside the laws protection, from gun sales to fraudulent transactions, and force platforms to do something about them.

Courts are already establishing the limits of the existing language of Section 230 by, for example, ruling that it does not protect Airbnb from violations of local rental laws, which the company had argued it should.

With the SAFE TECH Act, were looking to shift the conversation around Section 230 away from Republicans debunked claims of anti-conservative bias to the real harms caused by internet platformsthings like civil rights violations, stalking, and harassment," says Sen. Hirono. This bill lays down a marker and signals to Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others that the days of burying your heads in the sand while your platforms are weaponized against innocent users are over," she adds.

Some scholars warn that the SAFE TECH Act could be nearly as threatening to the internet economy as eliminating Section 230 entirely. It is sloppily drafted to an irresponsible degree," says Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford University, who was an associate general counsel at Google until 2015.

One provision enables claims against sites that receive or make payments for content. Ms. Keller says this could bring more lawsuits against entities such as Amazon Web Services, which could be liable for content shared by its customers users, and Bandcamp, which allows independent musicians to sell their tracks.

She says the law also loosely defines violations of peoples civil rights," and because it makes platforms liable for harassment or intimidation," it will be up to the courts to decide what constitutes harassment and intimidation of one user by another. The provisions intended to help victims of discrimination and harassment will be weaponized by trolls and white-supremecist organizations," she adds.

This legislation has some admirable goals," said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), one of the original authors and sponsors of Section 230. Unfortunately, as written, it would devastate every part of the open internet, and cause massive collateral damage to online speech." The SAFE TECH Act would also cause web hosts and cloud storage companies to purge their networks of controversial speech, and harm and silence marginalized people whose speech might be considered controversial, he adds.

A Pew survey published last August says that 90% of Republicans believe social-media sites censor political viewpoints. Some researchers have found the opposite is true. A just-published report from researchers at New York University found that in general, social media privileges and amplifies the views of right-wing users.

The PACT Act, originally proposed in June 2020, would require online platforms to explain their content-moderation practices clearly, require quarterly reports on what content has been removed, and impose less stringent requirements on small online platforms, to avoid placing undue burdens on startups without the same resources as Big Tech.

Other legislative efforts like the SAFE TECH Act have taken a more targeted approach to address very specific issues," says Sen. Thune. The PACT Act brings more transparency to technology companies content moderation practices so we can hold them more accountableand there is bipartisan support for the outcomes the PACT Act seeks to achieve," he adds.

The question of how to fix the internet with updates to Section 230 is far-reaching and complex enough it could require leadership from the executive branch, says Nicol Turner Lee, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. President Biden could convene a commission on a handful of topics related to speech online, including the regulation of hate speech, harassment and incitement, she continues, and make updating Section 230 part of its agenda.

Such a committee could form soon. In a Jan. 26 hearing, President Bidens nominee for secretary of Commerce, Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, said she would use the National Telecommunications and Information Administrations power to convene stakeholders to decide what is to be done about Section 230.

Whatever happens to Section 230, any changes to it cant possibly solve all of the problems of the modern internet which it has enabled.

Weve basically moved aspects of every kind of good and bad human behavior online, with consequences that are sometimes awful and very often complicated," says Ms. Keller. Now pundits and some people in D.C. have become convinced that we can tackle all of that by amending this one little law."

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.

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How Congress might upend Section 230, the law big tech is built on - Livemint