Section 230 is a piece of Internet legislation in the United States, passed into law as part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Section 230 generally provides immunity for website publishers from third-party content. protections are not limitless, requiring providers to still remove material illegal on a federal level.
About Section 230 in brief
Section 230 is a piece of Internet legislation in the United States, passed into law as part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Section 230 generally provides immunity for website publishers from third-party content. protections are not limitless, requiring providers to still remove material illegal on a federal level such as copyright infringement. In 2018, Section 230 was amended by the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act to require the removal of material violating federal and state sex trafficking laws. The law has frequently been referred as a key law that has allowed the Internet to flourish, and has been called “the twenty-six words that created the Internet’s Internet.’’ “Section 230 provides immunity from civil liabilities for information service providers that remove or restrict content from their services they deem obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, as long as they act in good faith’”, says David Weinberger, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of “Section 230: The Law of the Internet: An Introduction to the Section 230 Interpretation” (forthcoming at http://www.lawoftheinternet.org/section-230.html). “There is no immunity from state laws that are consistent with 230 though state criminal laws have been held preempted in cases such as Backpage. com, LLC v. McKenna and Voicenet Commc’ns, Inc.
v. Corbett he plain language of the CDA provides… immunity from inconsistent state criminal law.” “ Section 230, as identified above, defines that an information service provider shall not be treated as a \”publisher or speaker\” of information from another provider, says Weinberger. “A defendant must satisfy each of the three prongs to gain the benefit of the immunity: The statute specifically excepts federal criminal liability ), electronic privacy violations ) and intellectual property claims, he says. ‘‘Section 230 has come under more scrutiny on issues related to hate speech and ideological biases in relation to the power technology companies can hold on political discussions, and became a major issue during the 2020 United States presidential election,’ says Weinberg, who has written a book about the law. ’‘The law is not unlimited,” Weinberg says, ‘but it does provide protection from liability for operators of interactive computer services in the removal or moderation of third- party material they consider obscene or offensive, even of constitutionally protected speech’ ‘ Section 230’ is a ‘key law’ for the Internet, he says, and ‘the law has helped to foster the growth of the Web.‘ ‘It is a powerful tool for the free exchange of ideas, information, and commerce, and it should be used to protect consumers and businesses from harm, not to harm them,‘ Weinberg adds. � ‘
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This page is based on the article Section 230 published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 02, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
