Section 230 Faces a Reckoning

David Morar wrote for Thomas Reuters Foundation's Context about how the Supreme Court's anticipated Section 230 decisions may impact user experience online. In this commentary piece, Morar discusses how rulings in Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh could lead to various outcomes, including both immediate disruptions and future innovations.

If the court decides to limit Section 230 protections in any way, we can expect significant changes to our user experience online. It is not outside the realm of possibility that a broad decision implicating many kinds of algorithms could make any online service that uses ranking and recommendation tools - like a search engine or video-sharing platform - change their systems fully.

In the long-term, this change might lead to innovations in how content is presented and discovered online. Most likely in the short and medium term, it would create a serious disruption in the operation of services we’re used to seeing.

Another scenario would see the Supreme Court choose to invalidate more than just algorithmic recommendations, either partially or fully throwing out Section 230. That would mean platform action rests somewhere along an uneasy continuum, depending on how the Court expresses itself.

At one extreme, companies would be too fearful to moderate any content, leaving everything from death threats to graphic images online, effectively turning the internet into a truly lawless place with an “everything goes” attitude. At the other, platforms might end up needing to censor anything from recipes to political statements, requiring that they closely surveil every piece of content, or not allow user-generated content at all.