Are Online Companies Losing the Crucial ‘Safe Harbor’ of Section 230? (YNOT)

Read the full article by Gene Zorkin at YNOT.com

WASHINGTON – If you’ve read much about regulation of the internet, then you’ve probably heard many times that the ‘safe harbor’ offered to website operators under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has been of central importance to the development of the internet as we know it.

For good reason, much of the discussion of this safe harbor focuses on §230(c)(1), which 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.”

Advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sometimes refer to Section 230 immunity as “the most important law protecting internet speech” – and I suspect very few observers in the social media space would disagree.