As an organization focused on libraries we are very interested in facts, sources, and promoting information literacy - all of which are dependent on a strong First Amendment. The President does librarians and civics teachers everywhere a disservice by dragging the First Amendment into his fight with a private company.
Please help us reach more people like you. Click to share this petition on Facebook And Twitter!
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996 is a piece of Internet legislation in the United States that provides immunity for website publishers from third-party content.
Section 230 of this legislation was enacted during the expansion of the internet and is often referred to as a key law that has allowed the Internet to flourish, and has been called "the twenty-six words that created the Internet":
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.
This legislation is critical because Section 230(c)(1) provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an "interactive computer service" who publish information provided by third-party users. Without this legislation, companies would be forced to censor the users of their platforms MORE not less.
Make a donation to help us continue to fight.
Every $10 we raise helps us reach 1,000 more Americans like you.
Essentially, it ensures that private companies or individuals are not legally liable for the content created and published by their users. Without it, companies such as Facebook, Parlor, youtube, or Twitter would be liable for anything posted by their users and could be sued at any time for that content. Meaning, these platforms would have to moderate and review all content for approval before it’s posted. It would also mean that owners of blogs, forums, newsites and other websites would be held liable for any content on their website that they did not generate and if you ran or owned one of these sites, you could also be liable for those comments.
Section 230 was developed in response to a pair of lawsuits against Internet service providers (ISPs) in the early 1990s that had different interpretations of whether the service providers should be treated as publishers or distributors of content created by its users. After passage of the Telecommunications Act, the CDA was challenged in courts and ruled by the Supreme Court in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union (1997) to be partially unconstitutional, leaving the Section 230 provisions in place. Since then, several legal challenges have validated the constitutionality of Section 230.
Section 230 protections are not limitless, requiring providers to still remove material illegal on a federal level such as copyright infringement. In 2018, Section 230 was amended by the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (FOSTA-SESTA) to require the removal of material violating federal and state sex trafficking laws.
Fundamentally, we are hosting this Petition because we believe that the First Amendment is too important to drag into this spat, and, like many of our friends and colleagues, we would like to see online speech be more respectful and engaged with ideas rather than focused on ideology or personality. If you share our concerns about this the potential elimination of Section 230 - and the issues behind it - please join us in asking congress to support this legislation by signing the Petition today.