Telepeer

Agustina Vergara Cid: Killing Section 230 would end our free internet

March 28, 2026

Most of us spend hours every week scrolling social media platforms, reading the news, and buying stuff online without thinking about the legal framework that makes the internet possible. Famously known as “The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet,” Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, is under attack by some in Congress.

If they succeed, the internet as we know it would disappear and we would all be worse off for it.

Section 230 reads: “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.” These few words have a massive impact on the essentially free internet we enjoy. They state that online platforms (such as YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, and any other website that hosts user content) are not legally responsible for what their users post, just like a phone company isn’t liable for what people say on a call or a text message.

Without this law, the risk of hosting user content would be too high for online platforms. Who would allow potentially billions of people to post freely if every word could open up the possibility of a lawsuit against the platform? Almost no platform would, even if they had access to an army of lawyers, and many would simply disappear.

Imagine if a restaurant owner could sue Google because a customer left a false one-star review. Google’s legal cost would skyrocket, and the company would either have to vet every single review (which is extremely hard to do) or shut down the review service entirely. The result would be much more dire for smaller platforms that don’t have the resources Google has. Users would be worse off for it.

Section 230 also protects platforms from liability when they do moderate content (like removing posts and banning users). Before this piece of legislation, if early internet platforms tried to moderate some user content, they became legally responsible for all content they failed to remove (think: a news website would remove one defamatory comment and become liable for other similar comments it didn’t remove). This approach disincentivized moderation.

The internet is far from perfect, however, and truly appalling and illegal things happen there. But Section 230 doesn’t protect platforms from federal criminal law violations, the promotion or facilitation of sex trafficking, or intellectual property violations. Individual users can be held liable for their own behavior— as in the case of defamation. It’s not that this law takes liability away altogether, it just shifts liability away from the platform and back to the person who actually posted the content.

In their efforts to gut Section 230, Republicans like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas argue that “Big Tech is the new gatekeeper, the new speech police” and that platforms are unfairly biased against conservative voices, accusing them of “censorship.” Aaron Terr at FIRE answers that long-standing objection by explaining that platforms have First Amendment rights to editorial discretion: “As private entities, social media platforms . . . have a First Amendment right to exercise editorial discretion in deciding what speech to host, free from government coercion.” Cruz also complains about government forcing platforms to take down content they object to — but that’s a problem with government coercion, not platforms who are pressured to comply.

Democrats, like Sen. Brian Schatz, often argue that tech companies have used Section 230 as an excuse to avoid “taking meaningful action to protect users, especially kids, from egregious harm.” Kids’ safety online is important, but it can’t be addressed by gutting Section 230, which simply protects platforms from liability for user speech. Repealing this law would make kids’ online safety worse, because platforms would be faced with the “moderators dilemma” that Section 230 solved: they would have to perform invasive control requiring, among other things, sensitive data collection and extreme moderation practice, or not moderate at all.

Section 230 has been enabling a massive value for Americans for 30 years: a free internet. It doesn’t protect illegal behavior, as detractors imply— it simply protects platforms from predatory litigation, making it possible for them to host various points of view. The internet we use every day exists because of this law, and that’s a value worth defending in the face of Congressional attacks.

Agustina Vergara Cid is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. Follow her on X: @agustinavcid

Orange County Register

News Details

Agustina Vergara Cid: Killing Section 230 would end our free internet

News

CONTACT INFO

QUICK LINKS

SERVICES

CURRENT NEWS