Published: December 8, 2025
In 1996, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act in an effort to regulate “indecent” or “obscene” material to minors on the internet. These regulations were struck down by the Supreme Court in Reno V. ACLU (1997) for being overly broad and infringing on free speech rights laid out in the First Amendment. What remained of the 1996 Communications Decency Act was a statutory section informally referred to as Section 230. Often referred to as the “26 words that created the internet,” Section 230 states that “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.” In simpler terms, the companies that provided access to the Internet in the 1990s could not be held liable for the content posted on the Internet servers they hosted. An additional provision shielded platforms and companies from liability, while also allowing them to moderate content in good faith, meaning they were not the publishers of the content even if content posted by a users was taken down or edited by the platform.
Section 230 made sense in 1996. Connecting to the Internet could be over a ten-step process, and once online, the Internet was really only used for email, browsing, hyperlinks, and chat forums. A single image could take minutes to load, and an incoming phone call could abruptly disconnect the connection, as Dial-up internet consisted of using telephone lines for a modem to connect to an internet service provider.
Because this tech industry was so new, Section 230 allowed companies to focus on innovation, as potential lawsuits about content posted by users on the browsing sites and forums created by companies would stifle innovation. But so much has happened since 1996; Google, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter were all invented within ten years of Section 230 passing. In 2009, companies like Facebook and Twitter introduced algorithmic feeds instead of chronological ones, changing the function of their platforms from being about free speech and communication to engagement. By 2026, social media platforms had become a primary news source for many Americans, and algorithmic amplification of news became a major political issue. Americans using social media as a primary news source weakens our democracy. A large-scale study published in the journal Science by MIT researchers found, through analyzing Twitter data from 2006 to 2017, that false stories reached approximately 1,500 people six times faster than true stories did and that falsehoods were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than the truth. The study found that false news diffused “significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly” than the truth across all categories of information studied.
One reason falsehoods reach more people than the truth is that they generate more engagement, and the bottom-line profits of social media companies grow immensely bigger the more users engage. Social media platforms make money off an attention-based economy. In this economic system, social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok compete for users’ attention because the longer the app is used, the more data platforms can extract. This is accomplished through mechanisms that we enjoy about modern social media, so it’s a double-edged sword. Social media platforms use algorithmic feeds to prioritize content that is most likely to keep users engaged, infinite scrolling features and notifications encourage continuous use, and personalized content tailored to a user’s interests keeps them coming back.
This type of business practice has opened up a brand new market for social media platforms to profit from. This new market is called surveillance capitalism, a system in which companies like Google and Facebook harvest users’ personal data, including likes, comments, clicks, searches, location, and even device use, often without the explicit consent of users. Platforms track behavior through cookies, IP addresses, and apps. Data is then used to make future predictions about what users will buy, watch, or even vote for, and sold to third parties, including advertisers and political campaigns.
Section 230 in its current form has allowed these companies to take advantage of users and be shielded from consequences in the name of innovation. As Artificial Intelligence continues to be implemented into social media platforms, negative content continues to be amplified for engagement, and data continues to be sold to third parties and advertisers, users will suffer the consequences, and platform owners will make millions. Social media platforms aren’t like other products where a decrease in quality means consumers won’t engage with the product, because people are addicted to social media and internet content, and it’s also a part of everyday life. Section 230 currently grants immunity to social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook for the content that platform users post and states that they are not the publishers of the information. This will be hard to change, as Section 230 supporters argue that any attempt by Congress to control the content allowed on platforms or how it’s shown infringes on companies’ freedom of speech.
Instead, Congress should focus on somehow regulating these social media companies’ business practices and the selling of consumer data without proper consent, then maybe companies would revert to creating online spaces that foster connection and communication, rather than engagement and profit.
As a part of my senior Communications and Media Studies project, I created a Change.org petition to get the attention of Maine lawmakers to implement a law similar to the 2020 California law, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which gave California residents the rights to know, delete, and opt out of the sale of their personal data. If the product is free, you are the product.
