Section 230 Won't Die, No Matter How Hard They Try
It’s time again to talk about Section 230. Congress, the Senate, and the White House want to abolish it, while the AI industry is quiet about it. Let’s break it all down!
Sup! 👋
Today’s issue might be a dry one. Sorry in advance :)
For once, I don’t have some AI or crypto news to share, but rather a story I have a long history with.
We’re going to talk about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
This was one of the first stories I covered over a decade ago, when I was still struggling in Microsoft Word as a reporter.
And it seems like I can’t let go of it… Life has come full circle, and we have a fun update to this.
PS: If you enjoy this newsletter and believe your friends or family would too, a recommendation would be greatly appreciated!
OK, before we kick things off with the updates to the story, here’s a quick rundown on what Section 230 all entails.
Section 230 is part of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, and it basically says one thing: platforms are not responsible for what their users post. That’s it. That’s the whole deal.
Essentially, it’s the reason the internet works the way it does today, and it protects platforms from responsibilities.
A newspaper publishes a defamatory article, and they get sued. Facebook hosts a defamatory post from some random guy in the middle of nowhere; they don’t.
The law treats platforms as distributors, not publishers. A bookstore doesn’t get sued for selling a book with lies in it. Section 230 gives that same protection to websites.
There’s a second part most people forget about. Section 230 also lets platforms moderate content however they want, without losing their legal shield.
They can remove posts, ban users, curate feeds - all without being treated as a “publisher” who’s now liable for everything else on the site.
So yes, the same law that protects platforms from lawsuits also permits them to decide what stays up and what gets taken down.
The real tension comes down to a simple question: should a handful of Silicon Valley companies get legal immunity AND the power to decide what speech is acceptable?
Congress has been “about to reform” Section 230 for years now. Both sides hate it, just for different reasons.
The left thinks platforms don’t moderate enough.
The right thinks they moderate too much.
And in the meantime, Big Tech companies keep collecting the biggest legal shield in American history, while deciding the rules of the game for everyone else.
OK, with that out of the way, what’s the latest update?
See, in his first term as President, Old Donnie wanted to hold platforms more accountable.
He even signed an Executive Order in May 2020, stating that any platform that censored his posts would be after him.
In his mind, this should be forbidden, and there should be more accountability for the state to get rid of the protection of Section 230 for platforms such as X, back then, Twitter.
He even involved the General Attorney and wanted the law changed, as, in his mind, it was 25 years old and outdated.
But here’s the kicker: The executive order didn’t actually repeal or amend Section 230. It couldn’t. Only Congress can change the law.
And the courts weren’t buying it. Federal courts had been remarkably uniform in interpreting Section 230 broadly, exactly the way Congress intended.
Fast forward to today!
The old debate about Section 230 just got a whole new dimension: AI.
There is a growing push on both sides of the aisle to repeal and get rid of Section 230, because it never factored in the evolution of generative AI or Machine Learning.
The core problem is simple. Section 230 was built to protect platforms from liability for what users say, not for what the platforms themselves generate.
But AI is not a human, at least not yet, and the main argument from lawmakers is to either factor this into the Communications Decency Act or get rid of it completely.
You read about numerous cases where AI chatbots were involved in teenagers’ committing suicide.
So far, AI companies have been able to avoid major lawsuits through legislative technicalities.
Regarding Section 230, all of the companies are quiet as well. Maybe because they know they wouldn’t win, or because they don’t want to awaken a sleeping bear.
Lawmakers on the Hill are actively trying to push the agenda of ‘AI is not part of Section 230,’ and I expect some bangers about future developments.
For now, all you need to know is that Section 230 is still around, but AI might not profit as much from it as online platforms have in the past.
Next to the whole Section 230 madness, we’ve also had some fun stories on the Interwebs.
The following pieces or links are Tabs Worth Opening.
New AI doom scenario just dropped: This is a great read by a fellow Substacker in Alap Shah, where a future macro memo about how AI could crash the economy and markets by 2028.
The pitch deck got replaced by the pitch.md file: This article argues that you need to be laser focused on your writing and focus less on your ‘pretty slides’ in any pitch deck you write. Luckily, you got AI to help you out with that.
Spotify is pushing AI music, aka slop: Spotify started as a pirate company, but the recent developments with AI are pushing them further away from that vision. Now they want to include AI music in playlists and begin the rollout with the UK market first.
Dario Amodei is being summoned to the Pentagon: Claude and the Pentagon is a love story in its own kind. They will now meet for an ultimatum at the Pentagon, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will speak with them to ease the restriction on Anthropic’s LLM.
Manus released a vibe coding guide: Manus is quickly becoming a great AI tool for my day-to-day tasks and deep research. I also played around with their vibe-coding capabilities, and this blog was a great resource.
And that’s a wrap for the seventh full issue of Internet Native Capital.
Section 230 made a comeback, and I’m not 100% certain that I will cover this again in the future.
By then, it will be called Section_230.md, with a new framework about how AI content is being treated from a legislative standpoint.
However, this is in the distant future and until then, I alread look forward to covering the craziest statements by Congress or Senate members in public hearings. That makes for so many great memes…
See ya!