Undoing the Mistake of the Century

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was supposed to be a temporary fix. Times up.

I have a confession to make. I was complicit in what may have been the biggest public policy mistake of the last century. I didn’t know it was a mistake at the time. Instead, I am embarrassed to say, like most other Silicon Valley-based tech reporters back then I thought we were doing the right thing, which explains why I inadvertently contributed to the error. My role, which I very much regret, was joining those who passed on self-serving claims from for-profit Internet entrepreneurs and their venture capital backers that in retrospect we should have treated with far more skepticism. It was a classic case of “group think.”

I refer, of course, to the passage of Section 230 of the laughably misnamed Communications Decency Act of 1996, which provides Internet firms with protection from legal liability for third party content published on an “interactive computer service.” The key section reads: “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”.

Sadly, the collective failure of our Silicon Valley press corps to recognize this mistake and call it out as it was happening set the stage for a series of interrelated economic and political disasters that have since done great damage to our families, jobs, businesses, economy, politics, and…