"Our unprecedented ability to communicate online-on blogs, social media platforms, and educational and cultural platforms like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive-is not an accident. In writing Section 230, Congress recognized that for free expression to thrive on the internet, it had to protect the services that power users' speech. Section 230 does this by preventing most civil suits against online services that are based on what users say."
"Another option: giving protection to intermediaries only if they exercise a specified duty of care, such as where an intermediary would be liable if they fail to act reasonably in publishing a user's post. But negligence and other objective standards are almost always insufficient to protect freedom of expression because they introduce significant uncertainty into the process"
Section 230 provides broad legal immunity to online intermediaries, shielding platforms and intermediary users from most civil suits based on third-party content. The immunity enables widespread real-time user-generated expression by removing the need for intermediaries to pre-review every submission. Without such protection, intermediaries would face liability for all user speech, forcing impractical content review at scale and effectively ending many forms of user-generated communication. An alternative imposing a duty of care or negligence standard would create legal uncertainty and risk chilling free expression. The immunity applies to a range of intermediaries, from ISPs and email providers to social media platforms.
Read at Electronic Frontier Foundation
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