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When the Supreme Court hears a landmark case on Section 230 later in February, all eyes will be on the biggest players in tech—Meta, Google, Twitter, YouTube.
A legal provision tucked into the Communications Decency Act, Section 230 has provided the foundation for Big Tech’s explosive growth, protecting social platforms from lawsuits over harmful user-generated content while giving them leeway to remove posts at their discretion (though they are still required to take down illegal content, such as child pornography, if they become aware of its existence). The case might have a range of outcomes; if Section 230 is repealed or reinterpreted, these companies may be forced to transform their approach to moderating content and to overhaul their platform architectures in the process.
But another big issue is at stake that has received much less attention: depending on the outcome of the case, individual users of sites may suddenly be liable for run-of-the-mill content moderation. Many sites rely on users for community moderation to edit, shape, remove, and promote other users’ content online—think Reddit’s upvote, or changes to a Wikipedia page. What might happen if those users were forced to take on legal risk every time they made a content decision?
In short, the court could change Section 230 in ways that won’t just impact big platforms; smaller sites like Reddit and Wikipedia that rely on community moderation will be hit too, warns Emma Llansó, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Free Expression Project. “It would be an enormous loss to online speech communities if suddenly it got really risky for mods themselves to do their work,” she says.
In an amicus brief filed in January, lawyers for Reddit argued that its signature upvote/downvote feature is at risk in Gonzalez v. Google, the case that will reexamine the application of Section 230. Users “directly determine what content gets promoted or becomes less visible by using Reddit’s innovative ‘upvote’ and ‘downvote’ features,” the brief reads. “All of those activities are protected by Section 230, which Congress crafted to immunize Internet ‘users,’ not just platforms.”
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A legal provision tucked into the Communications Decency Act, Section 230 has provided the foundation for Big Tech’s explosive growth, protecting social platforms from lawsuits over harmful user-generated content while giving them leeway to remove posts at their discretion (though they are still required to take down illegal content, such as child pornography, if they become aware of its existence). The case might have a range of outcomes; if Section 230 is repealed or reinterpreted, these companies may be forced to transform their approach to moderating content and to overhaul their platform architectures in the process.
But another big issue is at stake that has received much less attention: depending on the outcome of the case, individual users of sites may suddenly be liable for run-of-the-mill content moderation. Many sites rely on users for community moderation to edit, shape, remove, and promote other users’ content online—think Reddit’s upvote, or changes to a Wikipedia page. What might happen if those users were forced to take on legal risk every time they made a content decision?
In short, the court could change Section 230 in ways that won’t just impact big platforms; smaller sites like Reddit and Wikipedia that rely on community moderation will be hit too, warns Emma Llansó, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Free Expression Project. “It would be an enormous loss to online speech communities if suddenly it got really risky for mods themselves to do their work,” she says.
In an amicus brief filed in January, lawyers for Reddit argued that its signature upvote/downvote feature is at risk in Gonzalez v. Google, the case that will reexamine the application of Section 230. Users “directly determine what content gets promoted or becomes less visible by using Reddit’s innovative ‘upvote’ and ‘downvote’ features,” the brief reads. “All of those activities are protected by Section 230, which Congress crafted to immunize Internet ‘users,’ not just platforms.”
How the Supreme Court ruling on Section 230 could end Reddit as we know it
As tech companies scramble in anticipation of a major ruling, some experts say community moderation online could be on the chopping block.
