Understanding Section 230 – Social Media Companies’ Get Out of Jail Free Card

For most companies, if they sell a product that harms consumers, people can hold them liable in a court of law for damages they suffer. However, uniquely, this is not the case for social media and other online platforms.??

In 1996, before social media even existed, the U.S. Congress passed a law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which immunizes “interactive computer services” from liability. This protection was intended to cultivate an internet industry that looked very different than it does today. ?

The internet industry has blossomed into a multi-trillion-dollar sector, and giant social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube dominate the media landscape, particularly among teens, who spend an average of almost 5 hours per day on these platforms.??

Times have changed, and yet our laws have not. Section 230 remains in place. It has become a shield protecting some of the world’s richest companies from responsibility for victims of their products.

For a deeper dive into Section 230, take a look at CCDH's explainer.

How Section 230 Deprives Victims of Justice??

Section 230 was created by legislators as a shield for well-intentioned companies to clean up the internet. Today it evolved into a weapon for giant corporations to escape justice and ignore victims. It has become a routine tactic used by platforms to protect themselves from liability and scrutiny under the law.??

In 2017, Matthew Herrick filed a lawsuit against Grindr, a popular dating app, to hold the company accountable for its failure to enforce its terms of service. A year earlier, a man began stalking him and creating fake accounts on Grindr in his name, matching with and directing men expecting sex to his workplace and home. Over the course of 10 months, nearly 1,400 men, as many as 23 in a day, arrived at his home and job.???

Herrick filed about 100 complaints with Grindr to close the false accounts, but the dating app refused to take any meaningful action, endangering his life. When he and his attorneys sued Grindr, the company used Section 230 in federal court to claim immunity from liability, which successfully halted his lawsuit.??

In June 2020, Kristin Bride awoke to find her son, Carson, dead by suicide after receiving hundreds of abusive messages on the anonymous messaging app Yolo. When she tried to sue Yolo in the U.S. for designing a product that was unsafe for children and allowed anonymous bullying, her case was dismissed in its entirety by a district court on the grounds of Section 230.?

The Culture of Impunity behind Section 230

Section 230 has created a culture of impunity in which the world’s wealthiest companies face no legal or financial consequences for their failures to protect users and remove harmful content.

Removing Section 230’s liability protections wholesale would not solve this problem. Instead, a more nuanced approach would be to place a condition on liability protections conferred by Section 230 to only protect platforms that make reasonable efforts to address harms, even if not every piece of harmful content is removed. It means that, like other companies in the U.S., social media companies would have to take meaningful steps to protect their consumers.?

This approach to Section 230 reform would strengthen the Accountability and Responsibility of social media companies, two bedrock principles of CCDH’s STAR Framework for social media regulation.

Want to learn more about the law that became social media companies' Get Out of Jail Free Card? Read our full explainer here.