As Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act enters its 30th year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched a series — The Internet Still Works — making an unfashionable but important point: the law that opponents blame for everything from harassment to election interference is also the legal scaffolding under the parts of the internet most people actually like. The April 2026 instalment focuses on Reddit, whose volunteer moderation model is among the clearest demonstrations of why narrowly tailored Section 230 reform is harder than its proponents admit.
The timing matters. A fresh slate of bills in Congress and statehouses would carve exceptions out of 47 U.S.C. § 230 — for algorithmic amplification, for AI-generated content, for product-design choices. Each is pitched as a surgical fix. Taken together, they would gut the legal floor that makes user-generated platforms possible at all.
What Section 230 Actually Does
The operative clause is 26 words long: "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." A companion provision, § 230(c)(2), protects platforms when they moderate in good faith. The two together accomplish something deceptively simple — they let intermediaries host third-party speech without becoming liable for it, and let them remove speech without losing the first protection.
Without (c)(1), every defamation, harassment, or IP claim against a user becomes a claim against the platform. Without (c)(2), every moderation decision becomes a potential lawsuit from the moderated user. The combination is what permits the modern user-generated internet to exist — including the parts critics of Big Tech profess to like.
The Reddit Example
EFF's interview with Reddit highlights a model that is genuinely different from algorithmic feed platforms. Reddit hosts well over 100,000 active subreddits, each governed by volunteer moderators who write their own rules, remove posts, and ban users according to community norms. The company sets sitewide policies, but day-to-day moderation is federated to people who care enough to do it for free.
This works because Section 230 protects both Reddit and the volunteer moderators themselves. A moderator who removes a hateful post, locks a thread, or bans a brigading user is making editorial choices that, absent § 230, would expose them personally to suit. The law treats that user — "any provider or user" — as protected too. Strip that out, and the volunteer-run model collapses overnight; no rational person moderates a subreddit for free under threat of being individually sued.
The Reform Proposals — and What They Would Actually Do
Recent reform proposals cluster around two themes:
- Algorithmic amplification carve-outs — the idea that a platform should lose immunity when it "recommends" or ranks content. The Supreme Court considered a version of this argument in Gonzalez v. Google (2023) and pointedly declined to rewrite Section 230 around it, sending the case back without disturbing the immunity. Congress has now picked the question up again.
- AI-generated content liability — proposals to deny § 230 protection to content produced "in whole or in part" by generative AI. The drafting problem is severe: almost every modern feed is partially AI-shaped (ranking, captioning, translation, spam filtering). A literal reading would swallow the immunity entirely.
State-level bills add a third layer. Texas HB 20 and Florida SB 7072 — both partly preserved and partly limited by the Supreme Court in Moody v. NetChoice (2024) — attempted to restrict platforms' moderation discretion. The Court reaffirmed that content moderation is First Amendment-protected editorial activity, but the state legislative appetite has not abated.
Why "Just a Small Carve-Out" Is the Wrong Frame
Section 230's value is not in any single application; it is in the predictability it gives small actors. A subreddit moderator, a Discord server admin, a fan-fiction archive volunteer, a Wikipedia editor — none of them has the legal budget to litigate a "good-faith moderation" defence on the merits. They rely on § 230 to get cases dismissed at the pleading stage. Every carve-out, however narrow it looks on paper, raises the cost of moderation by shifting fights to a later, more expensive stage of litigation. The predictable result is less moderation, not more — and worse outcomes for the very users reformers say they want to protect.
The algorithmic-amplification framing is particularly slippery. "Algorithm" in modern litigation means anything from a personalised For You page to chronological sorting to spam filtering. Courts asked to draw lines between "neutral" and "editorial" algorithms will draw them inconsistently, and platforms will respond by either dropping moderation altogether (the Section 230(c)(1) safe harbour) or moderating so aggressively that legitimate speech is collateral damage.
A Better Path
None of this means platforms should be unaccountable. Section 230 has never shielded federal criminal conduct, intellectual property claims, or, since FOSTA-SESTA in 2018, certain sex-trafficking-related conduct. Targeted statutes — privacy laws, anti-fraud laws, transparency mandates — can address specific harms without touching the underlying liability shield. The FTC and state attorneys general already have substantial authority over deceptive practices that Section 230 does not block.
EFF's Internet Still Works series is a useful corrective at a moment when the policy debate has tilted toward "something must be done." Something can be done — but breaking the legal floor under Reddit's volunteer moderators, Wikipedia's editors, and every small forum on the open web is not it. Thirty years in, the 26 words are still doing more work than their critics give them credit for.