Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - They Are Trying To Kill The Internet As We Know It

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

🚨 URGENT: Section 230 is under attack and it affects EVERY person who uses the internet. This is part 1 of my deep-dive series exposing the truth about the most important internet law ever created.Support my independent journalism:🙏 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/taylorlorenz 🗞️ Substack: https://www.usermag.co Every single time you leave a comment, post a review, or send a message, you are being protected by a law called Section 230, and right now, politicians on both sides of the aisle are trying to destroy it. Section 230 is the legal foundation for the modern internet. It’s why websites can host comments, forums, reviews, group chats, marketplaces, and social platforms without being sued into oblivion. It’s why Wikipedia exists. In this video, I break down what Section 230 actually is, why it was created, and how it shaped the internet as we know it. I uncover the forgotten history of the internet, from the early legal battles of CompuServe and Prodigy to the landmark Zeran v. AOL ruling. I explore why the "Big Tech" narrative is a lie, how repealing Section 230 would actually crush small creators and marginalized communities, and why recent efforts like FOSTA-SESTA have already been a disaster for human rights, marginalized communities, small forums, nonprofits, and independent creators. Despite what politicians and pundits claim, NONE of this is about protecting big tech companies. The fight over Section 230 is about who controls online speech, who gets a voice, and whether the internet remains an open space for all of us, or becomes a tightly controlled AI-surveilled hellscape dominated by censorship and corporate consolidation.This is the first episode in my entirely self-funded and self-produced multi-part series on Section 230. I dive deep into internet history, free expression and the growing push for mass online censorship. If you care about free speech, online communities, privacy, or the future of the internet (which you should!!!), this fight affects YOU, whether you realize it or not.Subscribe for the rest of the series, support my work below, and stay informed about the laws quietly shaping your digital life!Resources: https://www.whatissection230.orghttps://badinternetbills.comhttps://www.stoponlineidchecks.org Support my channel 🙏 My Section 230 educational series is 100% self-funded and self-produced. 🙏 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/taylorlorenz 🗞️ Substack: https://www.usermag.co Follow me:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz Instagram (alt): https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenzBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/taylorlorenz.bsky.social Covered in this video:What is Section 230 How CompuServe and Prodigy created the internet as we know itHow Section 230 protects ordinary users, not corporationsWhy both political parties are lying about this lawThe real reasons politicians want Section 230 goneWhy Big Tech SUPPORTS weakening Section 230How Section 230 protects marginalized communities, sex workers, LGBTQ groups, and reproductive justice activistsWhat you can do RIGHT NOW to fight back

There's something massive happening that would affect every single person on this platform that I hear literally no one talking about. Congress has proposed gunning Section 230. Their target is a federal law known as Section 230. Certain politicians are making a big stink about Section 230. Section 230. Section 230. Section 230. Or the repeal of Section 230, which would end the Internet as we know it. Lately, it feels like every single person in power across the political spectrum is united on taking down. one law. It's called Section 230. Republicans claim this law lets tech companies silence conservatives.

Democrats claim that it lets platforms profit from lies and misinformation, which is pretty ironic coming from the U.S. government. Both sides are trying to position rolling back this landmark protection for online speech as cracking down on big tech. But that's not what any of this is about, and they're completely lying when they're saying that. To understand why all these powerful people and political leaders want to abolish Section 230, you need to understand what Section 230 actually is, what it does, and why it exists. The reality is that the entire modern Internet

is built on Section 230. It's the reason you can leave a negative restaurant review without Yelp being sued out of existence. Section 230 is the reason fan communities can exist online. It's why any website can host a comment section. Section 230 is what allows blogs to exist and book reviews to be posted online. It's what allows forums and chat systems to exist at all.

Section 230 is the sole reason Wikipedia can function as a volunteer-edited encyclopedia. It's why the Internet Archive can preserve snapshots of the web's history. Section 230 is the reason you can sell something on an online marketplace like Poshmark or eBay. It's why you can upload photos to cloud storage or participate in group chats without your messaging app having to surveil and censor absolutely everything you and your friends say to make sure it abides by government-approved narratives. Section 230 protects all of this. I cannot explain how crucial and important this one small Internet law is. It's only 26 words long, but it is foundational. So why does everyone in power, both Democrats and Republicans,

seem so intent on destroying it? Well, I'm sure you can take a guess. But to understand this law, we have to talk about how and why it came into existence in the first place. This is the first episode in my multi-part series on Section 230. The fight for Section 230 is a fight for Section 230 is a lot of. a fight for the internet itself. And I know a lot of people don't like to pay attention to tech policy because it seems complicated or boring or whatever, but I promise you, this is not. The battle over

Section 230 directly impacts any other issue that you care about. I promise you. Over the next few months, I'll be breaking down what Section 230 is, why you should care about the law, and why every single powerful person across the political spectrum is trying to destroy it. I'll be debunking common misconceptions about Section 230 and dismantling the most common arguments. for Section 230 reform with facts and logic. I'll be diving deep into the unexpected corners of the internet that Section 230 protects, talking about why big tech actually supports Section 230 reform and discussing the relationship between Section 230 and the First Amendment.

I have so much in store from an interview with a sitting U.S. Senator to some fun and unexpected guests. Please hit subscribe and support my work on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter, UserMag at UserMag.com. This series is entirely self-funded. I actually tried to get an advertiser to sponsor this series, and I asked, like, everyone, again, this law is foundational. It is literally what protects the modern internet and every major internet company.

But surprise, surprise, I couldn't find a corporation to fund this series, and I think that should tell you a lot. So, as usual, my work is entirely self-funded, and every single dollar of your support makes such a difference. Now, to get started, we need to zoom back 30 years in history. In the early 1990s, the internet did not look anything like. like it does today. There was no mass social media, no platforms for group communications like Reddit or Discord. The very, very, very, very few people in America with internet access

went online using dial-up modems and they were really only able to access a handful of text-based forums and message boards. The internet was just starting out and it was so tiny and fragile and new. Two of the biggest companies offering internet services back then were called CompuServe and Prodigy. These companies both obviously their own proprietary digital environments. You have to remember, this is years and years before Google or web searching or anything like that. People effectively had nowhere to go once they logged on.

So these internet service providers, like CompuServe and Prodigy, literally taught people what being online meant by creating these little digital hubs for users. Ultimately, they paved the way for AOL, which came later on and which every millennial like myself is very familiar with. So when someone logged on using a dial-up modem in 1990, in 1991, they entered into these little CompuServe or Prodigy online environments. Inside these spaces were CompuServe or Prodigy discussion boards, forums, chat rooms,

groups organized around things like hobbies, finance, technology, and everyday life. People posted questions, argued about things, swapped stock advice, and shared opinions with strangers that they would never meet in person. At the time, this was all very, very, very new. You have to remember that back then, the internet was so small. It's hard to even comprehend how small it was. In 1990, effectively 0% of American households had internet access. It was actually just so significantly less than 1% it didn't even round up.

The entire American internet was only made up of a couple tens of thousands of people at most. And most of those users were like tech geeks, researchers, people at universities, government agencies, and defense contractors, of course. There was no worldwide web yet. It was really just these text heavy and command-driven CompuServe and Prodigy internet environments that weren't even really that accessible to people without some technical ability. Also, you had to pay by the minute to access them. But still, the internet was growing. Over the next five years from 1990 to 1995, we went from less than 1% of Americans having internet access

to 14% of Americans having internet access. Again, super slow, like dial-up internet access, it would make that sound. And most people also didn't really understand how it works. but the concept of people connecting to other people via the computer was just beginning to take hold. So CompuServe and Prodigy were running these little online spaces and people would log on and they would chat with each other. But lawmakers and the mainstream media had truly no idea or understanding of how any of this worked. They treated the internet like a fad or some strange novelty that was really just for like weird men in their basements. They struggled to grasp how the most basic online communities function or why,

any normal person would participate in them. They stigmatized and mocked internet users and when asked to explain fundamental concepts, like, I don't know, the concept of a website, they kept trying to compare the internet to traditional media. They just couldn't understand this new medium, but they knew that people were already using it

to get things like news. So they kind of started to think of CompuServe and Prodigy as newspapers, which is very funny and deranged because CompuServe and Prodigy were internet service providers. They were definitely not newspapers. These companies did not write or publish a single piece of content or employ any journalists or editors. They also weren't telephone companies necessarily because the conversations that were being had on them were not really one-to-one calls. They were public posts visible to many people at once, which meant that the internet had created something

entirely new. Places where companies provided the infrastructure for mass communication and users supplied the speech. That's the key, though. The users were providing the speech, not the companies. This is something that quite literally had never happened before at such a scale. Suddenly, for the first time in history, people didn't need to go through institutional gatekeepers to get information out, and this caused serious legal problems. For centuries, the law had drawn very sharp distinctions between different types of information handlers. But what do you do when suddenly everyone is an information provider. A newspaper could be held legally responsible for the content that it published because editors at the newspaper would manually review, edit, and choose every single word that ran in that

newspaper, obviously. This is also why government officials could easily get stories of major newspapers killed or changed. As we all know, editors in the mainstream media have always run in the same elite circles as government officials and CEOs. So people in power had enormous sway over legacy media. Now, suddenly, people were posting information online and reaching other people at scale, and there wasn't some powerful institutional gatekeeper there to stop them. This was revolutionary. But again, the media and internet laws on the books back then were not written to account for the internet. While many people in the media and government thought that we should regulate the internet like newspapers or movies, others argue that these internet providers were a lot more like

bookstores or libraries. No bookstore owner or librarian could reasonably be expected to read and approve every single word in every single book on their shelves, nor would we want them to. These people argued that that's kind of how we should view the internet. We don't want an internet where every single post and every single message on every single forum and every single website is subject to review and has to go through some process before getting posted to make sure that it complies with some set of government guidelines. We want people to be able to speak and connect freely. But not everyone agreed on this philosophy and how we should treat the internet.

The first major case to test this issue involved CompuServe in 1991. A user on one of CompuServe's little web forums about finance posted defamatory statements about an investment newsletter. The publisher of the newsletter sued CompuServe arguing that because the statements appeared on a forum hosted by CompuServe's system, the company should be legally responsible for every single word that any user posted on that forum. The courts disagreed. They ruled that CompuServe did not actively review posts before they appeared online. It did not edit, approve, or curate individual messages. Instead, CompuServe functioned more like a digital version of a library or a bookstore,

making content available without knowing precisely what each piece of content contained. Because of that hands-off approach, the court ruled that CompuServe should not be held liable for that defamatory post. Instead, the person who posted the defamatory post should be held liable. This makes sense, right? The person who actually posted the defamation should be liable for the defamation. A library shouldn't be sued out of existence because they carry the wrong book. We want free and open access to information. That's like foundational for democracy.

The court also recognized that it would be completely unreasonable, especially back in 1991, to expect an online internet service provider hosting thousands of posts a day to examine every single message posted to the internet before it appeared. And if CompuServe started to have to do that, there would effectively just be no free speech online. Judges also understood that these systems operated at a scale that traditional publishing never had. Again, even back in the early 90s, holding CompuServe legally responsible for every single post on the internet that it provided would have shut down the service entirely or basically rendered these forums that they ran unusable and useless. So everything seems fine and dandy,

but just a few years later, a second case arise. And it challenges this CompuServe ruling. In 1995, Prodigy, again, CompuServe's biggest competitor, faced a similar lawsuit over another defamatory post by one of its users. Like CompuServe, Prodigy hosted discussion, forums, and message boards. But unlike CompuServe, Prodigy had made a public effort to moderate its digital spaces. It advertised itself as family-friendly, and it used moderators and automated tools to remove posts that it considered offensive, vulgar, or illegal. Prodigy was trying to make its forums less toxic and more welcoming to try to get more people to use the internet. Because a lot of people back then were still really scared to use the internet because the majority of the internet was not moderated and they thought

that it was like this dark place full of you know bad stuff instead of being praised for this effort however prodigy was punished the court ruled that because prodigy exercised some control over some of the content by choosing to delete blatant spam and illegal content prodigy should be effectively treated like a newspaper and newspapers under long-standing defamation law can be held responsible for everything that they publish, including statements written by others. According to this legal reasoning, Prodigy's decision to remove the most extreme and in some cases illegal posts on their little online communities meant that it had taken responsibility for literally all of the content on all of its forums, even parts of the forum that it failed

to moderate or catch. Does this make sense to you guys? Basically, Prodigy was doing early forms of moderation. It was not taking down everything, but it was taking down like blatantly illegal stuff, blatantly like gore, porn, etc. etc. CompuServe wasn't moderating anything at all. They were basically like, we're a web services company, we have this little space you can go to that has message boards. We don't really know what's going on there and we're not going to take a look. Prodigy was like, hey, we're like the

family friendly alternative. Come on ours. We delete blatant spam and gore. So the first court case again found that CompuServe was not liable for the content that was on its forums. And then the second court case found that Prodigy was liable for the content on its forums because it had just deleted like blatant spam and like a few things. So it was basically, Basically, if you moderate at all, you're responsible for everything. Under the logic of these two cases taken together, online services were presented with a very miserable choice. Either don't moderate a single thing and let your platform become a free for all, including

allowing people to post blatantly illegal content, spams, and scams, or make an effort to remove some illegal content and become legally liable for literally every single post, reply, comment, and like made by users. Companies were being told effectively that content moderation in any form, even removing blatantly illegal material, was dangerous and would make you legally liable for everything that any user of your service ever said. The safest legal strategy then was to completely ignore abuse, spam, and illegal content entirely. Alternatively, a company could try to review every single piece of content before it went live on the internet. But again, even in the mid-1990s, this was totally unrealistic. And also, as more and more people got online, that task became impossible.

This legal trap did not just affect big companies either. It threatened the very concept of online discussion, comment sections, and messaging. One person who immediately understood how insane the situation was was Chris Cox, a Republican congressman from California. He read about the prodigy decision while traveling on a flight home and thought that these rulings were, quote, surprisingly stupid. Not only had the courts gotten everything wrong about the internet, but they were literally encouraging companies to engage in the worst behavior. They were actively destroying this little nascent thing called the internet, right, when

more and more people were getting interested and finding value in the online world. So Cox is like, okay, we need to figure this whole thing out. These courts are trying to apply these old, out-of-date categories of like newspaper publisher or distributor to something that really doesn't fit in any of those boxes. The concept of group discussions and free and open communication wasn't new. Of course, this is America. We have the First Amendment. So it's not like we needed some big heavy regulation.

But Cox was like, Congress should come in and make some sort of small legal clarification here that recognizes the unique nature of online services. Ron Wyden, a Democratic congressman from Oregon, was also super interested in technology policy and the future of online communication. He was thinking the exact same thing. Despite their partisan differences, the two lawmakers agreed on the core issue, which is that the law should not force digital platforms to choose between, total chaos and neglect or impossible oversight and mass censorship.

The law should allow the internet to do exactly what it was built to do. Connect people and allow for the free and open exchange of information. Platforms should be allowed to let users speak freely while also being allowed to remove harmful material and spam without fear of crippling liability. So they got to work on drafting a new law. The first key idea expressed in this law was that websites and online services that hosted content created by users should not be treated as newspapers or basically the speaker of the content. This is so important. And this is like the key concept of Section 230 that I want you guys

to understand. If you say something, you should be held legally liable for the words that you say. So if you threaten someone on the telephone, for instance, we don't hold telephone companies responsible for the threats that you make over the phone. Or if you write something threatening and you send it via FedEx, we don't let someone sue FedEx for allowing you to send a mean letter, threatening someone else. It's your speech, right? So you should be responsible for your own speech. This principle is core to this law. The second idea embedded in Section 230 is also as important. The law explicitly stated that platforms could engage in good faith moderation without losing their legal protection. So they could remove corn, delete threats, spam, illegal material, and that wouldn't

suddenly turn a website or an internet platform into a newspaper, which was responsible for every single thing that was said and run in that newspaper. This provision gave platforms the ability to remove spam, scams, and delete harmful content without being punished for failing to achieve perfection. Together, these two ideas formed what became known as Section 230. And Section 230 back in the 90s was actually not that controversial, if you can believe it. People back then actually recognized that this was a really, really crucial law to protect self-expression online. When it came before the House of Representatives, Section 230 passed by a staggering margin of 420 to 4.

Pretty much every lawmaker was like, yes, absolutely. These are the most fundamental principles of free speech and expression. And this law is so important. We all love Section 230. Like, let's go. I just want to take a minute here to say that if you're still watching, please hit the subscribe button and support my work on Patreon or Substack via the link below. Again, I'm 100% self-funded and this Section 230 series is not backed by anyone.

My work on this is entirely self-financed. I have zero corporate support, zero. and no long-term advertisers. I rely on support from people like you to do this work, so please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my sub-sac newsletter so that I can continue to make these videos. Now back to the history.

So Section 230 passes out of Congress. In 1996, President Clinton signed Section 230 into law as part of a larger package of legislation known as the Communications Decency Act. The Communications Decency Act has its own sordid history. And as I've covered on my channel before, the moral panic around kids and technology and the internet is not new.

In the mid-1990s, as the internet was rolling out, these parents' groups funded by far-right religious organizations were irate about the possibility of young people going online and maybe talking to a gay person or seeing a woman in a bikini. You have to remember, this was also decades before gay marriage was legal, and the legacy media environment at the time

was extremely bigoted, homophobic and misogynistic. So these far-right religious groups like from the jump, they did not want an open internet. Even today, they don't want an open internet. They wanted this top-down censorship model of the internet where platforms would have to manually review and censor any content that was deemed harmful for children before allowing it to be published online.

Sound familiar? It should sound familiar because that's actually what Congress is trying to do right now. But anyway, we'll get into that later. It's just funny that the arguments that were being made against the free and open internet back then are the exact same. And I mean like the exact same as the ones that the Heritage Foundation, Jonathan Haidt,

and all these right-wing lawmakers, like Marshall Blackburn, are making today. Like, literally word for word. They were like, um, do you want little Johnny signing up for the big, bad internet? What if he goes into a chat room and it turns him gay? What if he sees something about sex on a blog?

What if young girls learn about things like smosh-smortion? Sorry, I can't even say the word because, of course, YouTube censors it. These people were so crazy. They literally wanted a movie-style rating system for every website. Like, I'm not kidding. These parents groups wanted a government-approved body to basically rate every single website on the entire internet rated R, PG-13 or G, whatever.

They didn't think anyone under the age of 18, by the way, either, should even be allowed to message with friends online. It was so stupid. But again, this is what people also are trying to do today, so it never ends. The Communications Decency Act was the result of this moral panic, and it had some good stuff, but mostly a lot of bad stuff, and it ultimately was found totally unconstitutional. Civil liberties groups challenged the Communications Decency Act pretty much as soon as it passed, arguing that it violated the First Amendment by restricting lawful speech, which it definitely did. The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, which unanimously struck down the CDA's anti-indecency provisions. In a 90 decision, the court held that online speech deserved full constitutional protection, rejecting the idea that the Internet should be treated as some legacy news media. The ruling is known as Reno v. ACLU, and it is a landmark case for free expression online.

But it's important to note that the Supreme Court did not strike down the entire Communications Decency Act. Section 230 stayed and remained completely intact. Once again, lawmakers and the court recognized that unlike the censorship provisions of the Communications Decency Act, section 230 was actually really, really good and really, really important. Section 230 did not suppress speech. Instead, it basically acted like the First Amendment for the Internet by making it legally possible for digital spaces to exist at scale. All of this happened in 1997. So just to recap, seven years earlier, less than 1% of Americans had internet access. By 1997, 20% of Americans have dial-up internet

at home. The internet had grown from a few tens of thousands of users, mostly at universities, to tens of millions of Americans having dial-up. AOL was ascendant. People were learning about web pages, email, chat rooms, and people were kind of getting excited at the thought of early e-commerce. Section 230 very quickly became the legal foundation for our entire modern internet. If you're in a millennial like me, aka super old at this point, you're probably a little kid at this time. And you might actually remember this era. 1997 was the year that AOL launched AOL Instant Messenger, which literally could not have existed without Section 230. Section 230 allowed forums, blogs, social networks, review sites, and comment sections to exist.

I can't explain how much Section 230 changed the internet. Imagine if Section 230 didn't exist, like what the internet would have looked like. Every single website would have this like rating system on it. And every single word that anyone ever tried to post online would have to pass through like corporate conglomerate government sensors. Instead, thanks to Section 230, AOL was able to launch Instant Messenger,

which hosted vast amounts of user content without hiring armies of editors or lawyers to review every single IOM that you sent to your friend, to make sure that it was government approved. Section 230 also allowed platforms to experiment with moderation policies and make different spaces welcoming to different groups. For instance, Section 230 allows a BDSM forum to moderate itself differently than Club Penguin. Another millennial reference, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Much like the First Amendment, Section 230 doesn't guarantee that all speech is truthful or fair or inoffensive.

And a lot of people get really mad about this. They think, well, maybe these platforms should review every single post with AI to determine if it's true. And I'll explain in a later episode why that's like literally delusional and actually so dangerous. But suffice to say, section 230 made large-scale online interactions possible. And without Section 230, literally all of the digital spaces we rely on every day would have never existed. You would not be watching this video because YouTube's government sensors would probably not allow it. Without Section 230, ordinary people would never have a voice online. There would be no blogs, no comment sections, no group chats, no product reviews, nothing.

People today are so brain-rodded about Section 230 because they don't understand what it is. And they listen to these craven politicians and people in power and billionaires lying to them, claiming that, you know, it's this evil thing we need to abolish and it's a gift to big tech. And because most people don't understand how this law functions or where it came from, why it exists, they believe it. But Section 230 is not a gift to big tech. I'm making a whole episode on that later, so stay tuned. But suffice to say, section 230, like the First Amendment,

it's a gift to people, to citizens, to users of the internet. It gives users and average people power online. It lets users, aka the public, speak freely online without the threat of mass censorship or having to go through institutional gatekeepers. That is literally, by the way, why all of these powerful people on both sides of the political aisle hate it so much, like, hello.

But anyway, okay, let's go back to 1990. So the law is on the books now, internet service providers are scaling up, and pretty soon, millennial kids all over the country like me, would be logging on to AIM after school, chatting with friends and exploring the internet. But Section 230 was still really, really new. And as the internet was expanding, nobody really knew how the courts would interpret the nuances of it. The first test came in 1997. 1997 was actually like a really crazy year for internet history when you think about it. But anyway, back then, this man named... Kenneth Zeran lived in Seattle and he ran a small business. Six days after the Oklahoma City

bombing, someone started posting fake advertisements on an AOL bulletin board using Zarin's name and phone number. The ads were for t-shirts with slogans that were celebrating the Oklahoma city bombing, saying things like, visit Oklahoma. It's a blast. But the advertisements included Zeran's real phone number and told people to call him to order these t-shirts. Obviously, Zeran wasn't actually selling these t-shirts. He was being trolled and he immediately started getting death threats. His phone was ringing off the hook and he became terrified that someone would actually hurt him. He contacted AOL repeatedly asking them, please take down these advertisements.

I'm not actually selling these offensive t-shirts. But AOL was very slow to act. They actually had never dealt with anything like this before. It sounds so quaint now, but back then, again, 1995, 1996, 1996, 1997, no one really thought online harassment like this happening. Like this was seen as like really crazy. And so AOL didn't know what to do or who inside the company should even handle this. It took them some time to figure out what was going on and to get the post removed.

But as soon as they removed one post, another post would appear. Zarin couldn't identify the anonymous troll who was doing this. So he sued AOL instead. It's important to understand the nuances of his lawsuit. He wasn't challenging the precedent that Section 230 was built on. He wasn't claiming that AOL was like a newspaper, which again, had already that idea had been struck down by Section 230, he acknowledged that it was like a bookstore or a library, but he argued that because this bookstore or library AOL

had knowledge of the harmful content that they were publishing, they should be liable for that harmful content. Now, again, remember, bookstore owners and libraries aren't expected to read every single word of every single book on their shelves to make sure that none of this is causing someone duress. But if a bookstore owner was specifically told, that a book that they were carrying was defamatory to someone and they kept selling that book, could the person hold the bookstore liable? It's not like a perfect analogy because bookstores are obviously different from the internet, but that's basically the concept that Zeran wanted to test. And obviously, in this case, AOL actually knew about these post-terassing Zerun because

Zeran kept telling them about it and he argued that they weren't working fast enough to fix the problem. The case went to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge Harvey Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee with a very strong record on free speech, wrote the opinion. He rejected Zarin's argument and ruled that Section 230 eliminated both publisher liability and distributor liability. So essentially, if someone called up a bookstore and said, hey, this book is defaming me, it's a bad book, you know, it's causing me emotional harm, that bookstore shouldn't be held liable for the content in that book. The author of the book should be held liable. The Supreme Court declined to hear Zeran's appeal and his case became foundational. The Zeran,

decision allowed the internet to grow into what it is today because without that ruling every single website with user generated content would face the same impossible choice that prodigy faced before section 230 existed now i know what you might be thinking because this is what i was thinking when i first learned about this case years ago like why is it good that aOL wasn't held legally liable here don't we want platforms to crack down on online harassment isn't the decision in zeran v aOL a huge failure of justice man was like viciously harassed and the platform responded really slowly and it seems like this law shielded a platform from liability that seems really bad. But this is why understanding the nuances of these legal cases and this regulation is so crucial because a lot of it goes against what

you might initially think is like common sense. In reality, the ruling in Xeran V. AOL that upheld Section 230 ultimately actually protected the very people most harmed by online abuse. By refusing to impose notice-based liability on intermediaries like AOL, the court actually avoided creating a system where platforms would become legally punished for knowing too much. So if platforms could be sued the moment that they were alerted to harmful content, the rational response would not be faster, more thoughtful moderation, I wish. It would just be ignorance or over censorship or basically shutting down user speech altogether. Basically, we would be right back where we were with CompuServe and Prodigy, and it would be. legally risky for any of these platforms to regulate any content at all. So abuse victims would lose forums, communities, and channels, all of which depend on active but imperfect moderation.

Ironically, Section 230 by upholding free speech is what makes modern content moderation possible at all. The law protects a platform's ability to remove harmful content without becoming legally responsible for every single post that it fails to catch. Without that protection, platforms would be incentivized to either remove anything remotely controversial or to moderate nothing. Again, the CompuServe strategy because selective enforcement would mean lawsuits. Again, the prodigy situation. It all just comes back to prodigy versus CompuServe. I can't emphasize that enough.

But both of those outcomes actually make online harassment and abuse much, much worse, not better. Survivors, marginalized voices, and small community spaces would be hit the hardest if Section 230 was overturned. because only the largest corporations can afford constant legal defense. Section 230 is what allows platforms to experiment with different forms of moderation, improve their tools, and build trust and safety teams. Section 230 allows platforms to respond to abuse without the fear that every single mistake would be existential. I have quite famously experienced some of the worst of the internet. I've spent my entire career advocating for marginalized voices.

For those of us who care about online abuse and who want marginalized people to have safe, on the internet to speak and express themselves freely, the Zeran v. AOL ruling mattered a lot because it correctly placed responsibility where it belongs on the people who commit abuse, not the infrastructure that carries speech. Holding platforms legally responsible for user behavior does not stop harassers.

It just encourages censorship and consolidation. The Zarin ruling preserved an open internet where abuse can be confronted through better design, enforcement, and norms, instead of legal pressure that could be easily weaponized by bad actors and powerful people. Over the next decade, courts across the country built on the Zeron decision to expand Section 230's protections. In 2003, the 9th Circuit ruled that Section 230 protected an individual who republished

someone else's defamatory email on a list serve. This established that the law protects regular users and not just corporations, which was obviously a very big deal. In 2006, the California Supreme Court ruled that a woman's health advocate who posted a controversial opinion piece to a Usenet news group, that's a tongue twister, was protected, even though she didn't write the piece herself. This ruling was a really good thing because it meant that users couldn't be legally held liable for, you know, sharing a link to somebody else's article that might be defamatory. But in 2008, something different happened. The Ninth Circuit

heard a case called Fair Housing Council versus Roommates.com. The website, roommates.com matched people looking for rooms with people who had housing. To sign up, users had to answer questions about their sex, sexual orientation, and family status, and indicate their preferences for roommates based on those same characteristics. Housing discrimination group sued arguing that roommates.com was violating the Fair Housing Act by requiring users to disclose protected characteristics and express discriminatory preferences. Roommates.com tried to claim that it was fine that they were doing all this illegal stuff because they had Section 230 immunity.

This time, the court rightly said, no, you don't. The judge ruled that Roommates.com had crossed a line by requiring, users to answer specific discriminatory questions through drop-down menus. In this way, the website wasn't just passively hosting third-party user-generated content. It was actively developing that content. The site's design basically forced a user to make discriminatory statements, and that made roommates.com at least partially responsible for those statements, which meant Section 230 didn't apply.

But the judge in the case was careful to draw some limits. Search engines, for instance, that let users search for discriminatory criteria would still be protected. Neutral tools that users might misuse to do discriminatory things aren't the platform's responsibility. The key was that roommates.com had literally designed its system to require legally discriminatory responses. After that, things went along, I don't want to say swimmingly, but we saw the dawn of the social web. For the next 10 years after the roommates.com ruling, the internet blossomed and social media took off. We got all the major social networks, but also the internet exploded and went fully mainstream with the arrival of smart.

and wearables. Now there's no longer a separation between the internet and real life. The internet is real life and real life is the internet. The internet is embedded in everything we do from telling Alexa to order your groceries to group chatting with your friends after work to your smart watch monitoring your heart rate while you run. Then 2016 happened and we saw the beginning of the tech lash. Donald Trump won the 2016 election and instead of confronting years of growing systemic inequality, the failures of neoliberalism and And issues within the Democratic Party, the entire mainstream media and political elite class honed in on one villain, technology. Facebook was responsible for Donald Trump, they claimed, and so-called misinformation was destroying society.

Never mind that no one produces more misinformation online than the U.S. government, I would argue. But at the same time, the optimism of the 2010s was fading. And shuffication was just beginning. Monopolyistic tech platforms like Google and Facebook were crushing competition. destroying the open web, and people in power recognized very quickly that they could leverage this backlash against big tech for their own nefarious means. Did they actually want to crack down on big tech and regulate the business models of corporations like meta or Google? No, because no one in power wants to fundamentally challenge capitalism or these companies, which continue to be some of the

biggest lobbyists in D.C. Instead, they realize that a lot of people, especially on the left, are so, so insanely ignorant about tech policy that they could basically convince anyone on the left that any mass censorship or surveillance law, no matter how deranged, was cracking down on big tech. But chipping away at free expression and seizing government control of online speech while rolling out mass surveillance driven by AI could not be done overnight. Far right groups, religious fundamentalist organizations and reactionary pundits knew that to sell their mass surveillance campaign to the public, they'd have to start with their the same group that every cadre of bad actors seeking to push censorship and surveillance

laws has started with sex workers. If they had said back in 2018, hey, by the way, we actually hate that the internet is allowing the public to question people in power and challenge government narratives. And we want the government to have complete and total control over everything that you do and say online and off. Oh, and by the way, we're going to enact a sprawling mass surveillance infrastructure that's going to track every single thing. that you ever say or do and engage with online.

We're going to track every single word that you read, every Google search that you make. And if you step out of line or if you go to the wrong protest, we're going to use that information to arrest and prosecute you. And by the way, our AI is going to get access to all of this information and data. And it's actually going to determine if you're a criminal based on an algorithm that you can never see. People would have rightfully been like, um, I don't want that. But that's obviously not how these legal and political efforts go about it.

They take place very, very slowly over years, sometimes decades. For instance, look at how the right was able to overturn Rover's weight. It wasn't some overnight thing. These are meticulously orchestrated relentless legal efforts that play out over decades. So back to Section 230, a decade after the roommates.com ruling, you had the public for the first time starting to turn against big tech. But the public, and especially leftists and liberals, were also fundamentally ignorant about tech policy. They basically completely ignored tech policy, didn't pay attention to it, thought it was too complicated, boring.

I don't know why even to this day leftists don't seem to care about tech policy. It drives me crazy. And a lot of these people, unfortunately, also held reactionary beliefs about certain groups, including sex workers. So in 2018, Congress carved out the first real loophole to Section 230 since the law passed, a package of bills called Fasta Sesta, which stood for the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act. It was the first reel shot across the bow from groups like the Heritage Foundation and other far-right religious fundamentalist groups who have led the charge on seeking to dismantle Section 230. Fasta Sesta was bipartisan. Like a lot of these protecting kids laws that we're seeing today, no one wanted to vote against something claiming to fight sex trafficking. Never mind, that is not what the laws did.

Like, that is so not what these laws did. Foster Sesta passed the House with an overwhelming majority and the Senate voted 97. to two. Only Ron Wyden, one of Section 230's original authors and Rand Paul, voted against it. Fasta Sesta's claim was basically sites like Backpage.com were actively enabling sex trafficking, and Section 230 was letting them get away with it. None of this was true at all, and what actually happened after Fasta Sesta passed was a disaster. Platforms immediately started censoring vast amounts of legal content. Craigslist shut down its entire personal section overnight and other sites followed.

Sex workers who were using online platforms to screen clients and work more safely to actually avoid getting sex trafficked lost those tools overnight. Studies found that Fasta Sesta significantly increased the danger for sex workers and was a massive boon for the sex trafficking industry. Because sex workers could no longer operate safely online, they were basically funneled into the arms of sex traffickers. A government accountability office report later found that Fasta Sesta, effectively never produced even one single trafficking prosecution, not one.

Instead, Fostasesta became a case study in what happens when you punch holes in Section 230. Platforms don't respond by becoming better moderators. They respond by eliminating anything remotely risky. The people who get hurt are the most vulnerable users who depend on these platforms the most. But the Fasta Sesta legal win for far right and religious fundamentalists was like, blood in the water. It emboldened them, and they realized that by pushing a moral panic about the internet and social media, while also telling stupid leftists that the Heritage Foundation's tech policy slate was somehow cracking down on big tech, they could get wide support for their

deeply authoritarian policies from across the political spectrum. Gonzales v. Google involved the family of a victim of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. They argued that YouTube's recommendation algorithm made Google liable for aiding terrorism by suggesting ISIS videos to users. The case was nothing but a ruse to try to get the court to start to dismantle Section 230, but instead of ruling, the court punted. In a short, unsigned opinion, the justices said that underlying terrorism claims were basically too weak to decide the Section 230 question. So they essentially kicked the can down the road. To me, though, what was so chilling about that case was what Justice Elena Kagan said after.

She made a statement saying, I mean, we're at court. We really don't know about these things. You know, these are not like the nine greatest experts on the internet. I remember hearing this for the first time after Gonzalez v. Google, and it literally made me sick to my stomach. You're not the nine greatest experts on the internet. Okay, but our entire literal society is enmeshed and intertwined with the internet.

You're literally treating the internet as a punchline. The internet is the most important, most revolutionary technology, potentially in human history. And you're like, oh, we don't really know about these things. He he, he, he, he. Like, okay, well, you should know about these things. You should know about these things because you're literally the highest court in the country. And you're supposed to be regulating these tech platforms that have become global superpowers. And it seems like you guys and people in Congress don't even know how to turn your computers on.

and it's all one big joke to you. How can we count on these people to effectively regulate technology when they don't even understand the most basic fundamentals of technology? And in that clip, Kagan continues. And I don't have to accept all Ms. Blatz, the sky is falling stuff to accept something about, boy, there is a lot of uncertainty about going the way you would have us go, in part just because of the difficulty of drawing lines.

in this area. And just because of the fact that once we go with you, all of a sudden, we're finding that Google isn't protected. And maybe Congress should want that system. But it's listening to this, I literally want to reach through the screen and shake everyone. Her being like, hey now, wait a minute. If we go along with this crusade to dismantle Section 230, which is basically like what she's referencing in that clip, then something like Google wouldn't even be protected.

It's like, yeah. literally would no longer have access to any non-government approved information. That's the whole point. That's why we're upset about this. And I'm not just trying to like shade Justice Kagan, who's a brilliant legal mind, but it is really, really concerning when she's like, I don't know, maybe Congress can figure this out. When the majority of Congress never even grew up on the internet doesn't understand the most basic concepts related to technology and half of them are over the age of 80 with dementia. Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation and their cadre of extremely online, well-funded far-right fundamentalists are not quitting.

These people are funded by billionaires and their sole goal is to destroy the internet and roll out mass AI surveillance. They're funding an endless stream of media to propagandize and misinform the public on these issues, while more and more cases that attack Section 230 continue winding their ways through the courts. Just recently, Texas and Florida have passed laws trying to limit how platforms moderate content. We're seeing identity verification laws that remove not. anonymous speech online. Abortion content is being blocked in states like Texas.

LGBTQ people are being de-platformed in places like Kansas and Missouri. And Democrats are now leading the charge on mass censorship and surveillance by pushing policies to reform Section 230 that groups like focus on the family could have only dreamed of. All because they don't like their constituents being able to speak freely online and call them out on things like funding, you know, I don't know, war crimes in Gaza. This week is the 30-year anniversary of Section 230. And for the past three decades, Section 230 has been the legal bedrock of the entire modern internet. It's the legal foundation that allows you to post a restaurant review, leave a comment on a news article, forward an email, or share your opinions online at all in any capacity.

It's the reason Wikipedia can exist. It's why you can sell things on eBay or find an apartment on Craigslist. And these politicians who don't care about any of this, who grew up in a time when they got news by, like, Telegram, who are being seen. spoon-fed baby food for dinner want to tear it all down. And these ignorant, ignorant leftists and progressives are going along with it because they think somehow that mass AI surveillance and rewarding people like Peter Thiel with billions of dollars is somehow cracking down on big tech. Like, are you guys delusional? We have to do everything in our power to protect Section 230. We cannot even give an inch to people who want to reform or alter it. It is the single most important,

protecting our freedoms on the internet. What I think is so insidious too on top of all of this is that big tech itself is now backing efforts to revoke or reform Section 230. Because as they embrace AI, they know that they have the massive resources necessary to moderate platforms at scale. Not like they'll be doing it well, mind you. But multi-billion dollar tech companies now want a repeal of Section 230 so that they can consolidate power and eliminate all competition. For instance, say you want to start a small internet company or a blog or some small forum based on a hobby or niche. Right now, you can set something like that up in minutes. You don't need a massive and expansive legal team capable of vetting every single post of user-generated content on your forum for legal liability.

Section 230 means anyone can build a community online without being immediately bankrupted by lawsuits and legal costs. Big Tech hates this, though, because they don't want any competition. They want your entire internet experience to be mediated through meta and Google. Weakening Section 230 would help big tech consolidate power because it would significantly raise the barrier of entry to anyone who wants to compete with them by building a community on the internet. You know who won't have the kind of capital to compete with meta and Google? Small communities, non-profit platforms, platforms and forums founded for a public good. If you think the entire internet is a profit maximizing hellscape now, just think of what it could be when literally, our entire online experience is a big tech dominated health scavelled by AI to ensure no one ever

says or consumes anything that the government doesn't like. I'll be diving into all of this in a later episode, but the companies most threatened by changes to Section 230 are small forums that serve niche communities, communities built to support those suffering with addiction or abuse, nonprofit projects that run on volunteer labor, or really any platform that isn't explicitly profit-based. It's worth remembering that Facebook was one of the first. of the first tech companies to endorse Fasta Sesta. Why would Facebook support weakening Section 230? Because Facebook can afford to fight lawsuits and roll out mass compliance with AI. What Facebook doesn't like is competition from online communities and less profit-driven platforms that challenge

its dominance. I just, I really hate this idea that like Section 230 protects Big Tech. It doesn't. It protects you. When you forward an email, you're protected. When you share someone else's tweet, Section 230 is protecting you. When you post a link to a news article, you're protected by Section 230. If you run a blog with a comment section, you're protected. If you moderate a Discord server, you're protected. You don't need a team of lawyers to do any of these things, nor should you, thanks to Section 230. None of this means that the internet is perfect or that tech companies are above criticism.

I am a huge, huge critic of big tech. I literally hate these evil monopolistic companies that are destroying our internet. There are many, many legitimate concerns about how these platforms operate. But Section 230 is not the cause of these problems and repealing it would not fix them. I'll be diving into way more solutions in a later video in this series. But if you're concerned about monopoly power and tech, the answer is antitrust enforcement, not destroying the legal framework that allows competition to exist. Or if you're concerned about data privacy, the answer is comprehensive data privacy legislation.

If you're concerned about algorithmic amplification of certain content, the answer is transparency, requirements and giving users more control and more choice, not burning the entire internet down. Almost every single civil liberties group out there is sounding the alarm over what's happening right now. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, a slew of LGBTQ orgs, reproductive justice orgs, and more are speaking out. Library associations, journalism groups, and civil liberties advocates are begging people to please fight to protect Section 230. But politicians aren't listening. because most voters don't understand what's at stake. And most people on the left, again, I'm sorry to say it,

are completely ignorant about tech policy. No hate, seriously. But think about the last time your favorite liberal or progressive content creator even spoke about tech policy or Section 230. These leftists and liberal content creators are not listening to sex workers, trans people, abortion activists and other marginalized groups whose lives would be devastated if Section 230 was reformed. Instead, they push moral panic BS because they're ignorant audiences

think that it means they're somehow tough on big tech. Literally, while they advocate for policies and promote a moral panic that will entrench and is entrenching big tech's power. And the mainstream media is also very complicit in this effort. It's no secret that legacy media and all people with institutional power hate the liberatory power of the internet. They do not want a world where anyone can challenge their narratives online, where the New York Times can be called out for, I don't know, pushing blatant lies about what's happening in

Gaza. They want to take us back to the 1960s, where what people in power said couldn't be questioned. So the legacy media feeds these moral panics about the internet and continues to straight up lie to the public about how these laws work and what these legal efforts are really about. And I will say this is not all tech reporters. There are some amazing tech reporters in legacy media who do incredible work. But I'm primarily talking about these big name New York Times pundits or the editorial pages of major newspapers, huge liberal podcasters like the the Pod Save America bros and reactionary centrist influencers who are funded by the same massive dark money groups that are backing these attacks on Section 230.

And because technology policy doesn't exactly make good television, so much of this is happening in obscure congressional hearings, state houses, and through legal briefs that basically no one aside from a very small handful of tech policy reporters are even reading. But every single one of these state laws and legal cases matters because they establish legal precedent collectively. Every single time a court upholds Section 230, it reinforces the legal environment that allows user-generated content to even exist. And when a court weakens it, like what happened with Sestafasa, platforms become more risk-averse and likely to remove even more content preemptively. What I want you guys to understand is that if you use the internet, Section 230 protects

you. Section 230 is literally what makes the internet as we know it possible. This little 1996 long literally made the greatest expansion of human communication and knowledge sharing possible. So please, please, contact your representatives right now. Tell them that you understand what Section 230 actually does and why it matters. Tell them that you will not accept reforming this law and do not let their staffers gaslight you or feed you misinformation. Tell them that destroying Section 230 would hurt ordinary users while helping the exact big tech incumbents that they claim to oppose. Section 230 is crucial to the internet. It is something that you rely on every single day, whether or not you realize it.

And we need to protect it in every way possible. For more information and a script that you can use to call your lawmakers and to learn more about Section 230, go to what is Section 230? It's a great website made by Fight for the Future, an amazing Civil Liberties organization, that fights for marginalized people to have a voice online. I'll also just tell you guys, again, it is so ironic that all these bad actors, claim all the time. Oh, Section 230 helps big companies. It helps big tech. I've been planning this Section 230 series for literally almost a year. And as I mentioned, I tried to get this series sponsored. I went to so many organizations and companies and asked, hey, do you want to sponsor this? Like, Section 230 is allegedly so important to your business model. And no, they wouldn't. Of course

they wouldn't. And as usual, almost every single thing that I produce for this channel is entirely self-funded. I have zero longstanding partnerships with any advertisers. And I rely 100, on support from people like you to do this work. I just think it's so ironic that while these astro-turfed liberal groups get literally millions and millions of dollars to make content all day about how bad and evil Section 230 is, the people that are fighting for this have nothing. We have no funding. We have no institutional backing.

We have no big-name donors. It's literally just people like me and other activists, sex workers, trans people, reproductive justice activists, everyone that is trying to come together and make people on the left wake up and start to care about tech policy. Because the right absolutely cares about this stuff, and it's how they've been able to monopolize so much control of the internet. So if you like my work, please support me on Patreon

via the link below or by a paid subscription to my substack newsletter at usermag.co. That's usermag.com. On Patreon, I do bonus podcast episodes, a monthly Q&A live stream and more. On my substack newsletter, I do a biweekly roundup of everything that I'm reading and following online. You can also get that newsletter

via my Patreon. Thank you so much for your support and I'll be back soon with the next episode of my Section 230 miniseries.