OPINION:
A bipartisan bill in Congress threatens conservative speech online.
Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which makes users responsible for what they post online rather than the websites they post on, is the target of legislation that would “sunset” the provision by the end of 2025.
Conservatives will be harmed if Section 230 is allowed to expire.
Section 230 is badly misunderstood in our public discourse. It does not provide unlimited liability protection for tech companies, but rather prevents a constant stream of lawsuits for what users post on social media. Without it, no church, small business or Rotary Club could run a website without risking lawsuits from trial lawyers looking to raise money for Democrats.
The two leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Washington Republican, and ranking member Frank Pallone, New Jersey Democrat, trumpeted their new bill in The Wall Street Journal two weeks ago, saying it would “force Big Tech’s hand.”
They assert that with the liability shield gone, tech companies would come together to negotiate a new settlement. What this new arrangement would look like is unclear, and the expedited markup the bill received last week did not shed much light on the matter.
Progressive Democrats want to distract from the fact that the federal government is the driver of social media censorship. Indeed, as the Twitter Files, subsequent congressional investigations, and discovery from the Supreme Court case Murthy v. Missouri have documented, political censorship on social media is almost entirely driven by pressure from government officials.
Punishing tech companies for reacting to government pressure would be shooting the messenger while leaving the FBI and Department of Homeland Security agents threatening Americans’ civil liberties to strike another day, which they are already moving to do.
With Ms. McMorris Rodgers retiring at the end of this year, conservatives who feel aggrieved by tech companies’ treatment of them should be especially suspicious of anything Mr. Pallone is leading. Does anyone really think the new regime he negotiates will be better for the political right?
Conservatives should also appreciate how Section 230 has enabled them to bypass the gatekeepers of the mainstream media — which they also complain about — and compete on a level playing field with the left. By any objective measure, social media has been a boon to the right. Would Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign have gotten anywhere without Twitter? Would Pierre Poilievre be competitive for prime minister of Canada today if not for his aggressive social media strategy?
From 2020 until 2022, the top news publisher driving traffic on Facebook was The Daily Wire. Since 2023, it has been The Daily Mail, a British right-of-center publication. The current top political account on X (formerly Twitter) is that of Tucker Carlson, followed by progressive Rachel Maddow and conservatives such as Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro and Megyn Kelly. And that’s only if you don’t count politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz or the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, who has made his recent shift to the right quite public.
Speaking of Mr. Musk, his purchase of what we once called Twitter should put to bed any calls to do away with Section 230. To the extent free speech was threatened online by social media platforms, his purchase demonstrates that there is a market solution to the problem. There was an unserved market for a platform committed to free speech, so competitors like Parler started going after Twitter’s market share, then a billionaire investor bought the platform and transformed it to reach this market.
Without Section 230, X would be bankrupt from a mountain of lawsuits, and other platforms would censor anything Washington bureaucrats don’t like to avoid them.
Anyone concerned about free speech should oppose this hasty and misguided effort to destroy the law that has allowed the internet and political debate to flourish in tandem. The survival of conservative speech online depends on it.
• James Erwin is executive director of Digital Liberty and federal affairs manager for telecommunications at Americans for Tax Reform.
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