As Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act enters its 30th year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched a sober reminder to lawmakers: the internet, in fact, still works. In an April 2026 installment of its The Internet Still Works series, EFF profiled how Reddit's distributed, volunteer-driven moderation model depends on the 26-word liability shield Congress keeps threatening to dismantle. The timing is not accidental. Multiple bills aimed at narrowing Section 230 are again moving through committee, and the question facing Congress is whether to break the law that made the modern open internet possible.
The law in 26 words — and what it actually does
Section 230(c)(1) provides that “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 second provision, 230(c)(2), gives platforms a “Good Samaritan” shield when they remove or restrict objectionable content in good faith. Together, those clauses do something deceptively simple: they assign legal responsibility for online speech to the person who posted it, not to the website that hosted it.
That allocation of liability is the structural feature that lets a teenager run a fan-fiction forum, a city librarian host a book-club blog, or a volunteer biologist moderate an invasive-species subreddit without first hiring lawyers. It is also, as EFF's recent profile underlines, the precondition for community-led moderation at scale.
Reddit as a stress test
Reddit hosts more than 100,000 active communities — “subreddits” — each with its own rules written and enforced by unpaid volunteers. The company itself sets baseline content policies, but the day-to-day work of deciding what counts as on-topic, civil, or appropriate is delegated to moderators who collectively make millions of judgment calls a week. EFF's interviewees describe this not as a workaround but as the design: federated moderation works because no single entity, including Reddit Inc., is forced to act as the publisher of every user post.
Strip away Section 230 and that model collapses overnight. If Reddit became legally answerable for every comment in every subreddit the moment a moderator touched it, the rational corporate response would be to centralize moderation, pre-screen posts, or simply prohibit the kind of niche, contentious, or controversial communities that depend on volunteer stewardship. The casualty would not be misinformation. It would be the long tail of useful, weird, civic, and creative speech that defines the open web.
The bills on the table
Congress has spent the better part of a decade looking for ways to narrow Section 230, with proposals ranging from the SAFE TECH Act to the EARN IT Act to algorithm-targeted carve-outs. Each is sold as a surgical fix; each, in practice, would expose platforms to crushing litigation costs over user speech. The Supreme Court declined to rewrite Section 230 itself in Gonzalez v. Google (2023), pointedly leaving the question of reform to Congress. That deference has been read in Washington as an invitation.
The problem is that “reform” in this area almost never produces what its sponsors advertise. The 2018 FOSTA-SESTA amendments, the only material narrowing of Section 230 to date, were sold as a way to combat online sex trafficking. A 2021 Government Accountability Office report found the law had been used in only a handful of federal prosecutions while pushing consensual sex workers off mainstream platforms and onto unsafer ones. It is the textbook case of a proportionality failure: a real harm identified, a blunt instrument deployed, and predictable collateral damage to lawful speech and small platforms.
A pro-innovation reading
People of Internet's editorial position is straightforward: the United States should preserve Section 230's core liability shield while welcoming targeted, evidence-based interventions where genuine harms can be shown and narrower tools have failed. That is not a maximalist defense of platforms. It is a recognition that the alternative to Section 230 is not a more accountable internet — it is a more consolidated one.
Three points are worth keeping in front of legislators:
- Small actors lose first. Meta and Google can absorb the compliance cost of a post-230 regime. Wikipedia, Discord servers, a city subreddit, and your local mutual-aid Slack cannot.
- Moderation increases, not decreases, when liability is clear. 230(c)(2) was written precisely so that platforms could remove harmful content without becoming legally responsible for everything they failed to remove. Weakening the shield discourages active moderation — the opposite of the stated goal.
- First Amendment law already constrains the worst harms. Section 230 does not immunize federal criminal conduct, intellectual property claims, or, post-FOSTA, sex-trafficking liability. The notion that platforms operate in a legal vacuum is simply wrong.
What Congress should do instead
If lawmakers want to improve the online ecosystem, the productive avenues are well-mapped: a comprehensive federal privacy law, antitrust enforcement against genuine gatekeepers, transparency mandates that illuminate moderation decisions without dictating them, and resources for state attorneys general and the FTC to pursue existing legal remedies. None of these require touching Section 230. All of them would do more, faster, with less collateral damage to the small-platform internet.
The EFF's anniversary series makes a quiet but important argument: the burden of proof should be on those who want to dismantle a working system, not on those who want to preserve it. Thirty years in, Section 230 is doing what it was designed to do. Congress should resist the urge to break it.