TPA on SCOTUS Section 230 Hearing

For Immediate Release                                                 Contact: Abigail Graham: (202) 417-7235

February 16, 2023                                                                               

Washington, D.C.— The Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA), a nonprofit, nonpartisan taxpayer and consumer advocacy organization, calls for the Supreme Court to uphold the current interpretation of the law known as Section 230. The Court will hear two cases pertaining to the law in the coming days, Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh.

TPA Executive Director Patrick Hedger offered the following comment:

“Section 230 is a widely misunderstood and maligned law that forms the backbone of the internet economy. Tampering with it poses an existential risk to trillions of dollars worth of investments and millions of jobs. Weakening its protections would expose countless businesses to an endless stream of frivolous lawsuits, draining the pockets of innovators and investors to line the pockets of trial lawyers, all while depriving consumers of critical services that they rely on.

“For all the rhetoric, debate, and confusion, Section 230 is a very simple law. It enshrines a commonsense set of principles and protections. First, you are responsible for what you say on the internet, not necessarily the website where you say it or who shares it. Second, companies should not immediately assume liability for the countless other things that may be on their websites simply because they choose to moderate other content, consistent with both their protected First Amendment and property rights.

“Prior to Section 230, existing precedent set the stage for the internet to become a cesspool with limited uses compared to what consumers enjoy today. Without Section 230, websites were held liable if they exercised their rights to clean up their property and reduce harmful content, but not if they let anything go. It was the equivalent of punishing a waterpark for choosing to have lifeguards and janitors. A bipartisan effort in Congress quickly recognized this terrible dynamic and corrected it with Section 230, protecting companies that choose to exercise their rights to moderate content as much or as little as they see fit.

“Some conservatives have targeted Section 230 due to the mistaken belief that it harms free speech. Nothing could be further from the truth. Section 230 is an enabling statute, allowing for websites to host as much legal speech as they like, or exercise their own intrinsic speech and association rights, without immediately assuming a lethal level of legal liability. Like it or not, a user’s right to free speech and a website’s right to not host that speech are one in the same. Weakening one harms the other, both practically and legally.

“Those who misguidedly deride Section 230 are able to reach enormous audiences like never before because of it, even with tech companies making many highly questionable, illiberal content moderation decisions. Splitting open Section 230 will only lead to websites either clamping down on speech even more aggressively or becoming unusable cesspools where anything goes.

“Finally, it must be said that many efforts behind eroding Section 230 reek of cronyism and cynicism. Section 230 has allowed new, online media to flourish and produce entire new sectors in the advertising and retail industries. There are those who wish to see Section 230’s protections eroded purely to weaken their relatively new competitors in cyberspace. There are also those who claim to support free speech, but are dissatisfied with how online service providers are exercising their own speech and property rights. Rather than defending the rights of those with whom they disagree, they’d rather just flip the table over and deny anyone the benefits Section 230 provides. These voices prey on the confusion around this simple law and should be rejected.

“For advocates of the Constitution, limited government, and free markets, Section 230 should be celebrated as the greatest single piece of tort reform, expansion of commerce, and guarantor of speech rights in the last half-century or more. TPA is hopeful the Supreme Court will recognize these basic truths and leave Section 230 intact.”

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Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to educating the public through the research, analysis and dissemination of information on the government’s effects on the economy.