Don’t Repeal Section 230. Clarify It.

(This is a column I wrote for Signal360, P&G’s companion publication for its Signal conference, which I co-produce. It’s always fraught to weigh in on this fundamental piece of Internet legislation, so I welcome your thoughts!)

It’s difficult to find anything Congress agrees on these days, but when it comes to the much-misunderstood policy known as “Section 230,” it’s unanimous: this piece of 20th-century legislation needs to be fixed. And while such a fix may be needed, it could have a significant impact on how every company goes to market. 

Passed in 1996 as part of a larger telecommunications bill, Section 230 shields internet platforms from liability for content created by their users. The legislation also allows companies to moderate “objectionable” content on their platforms – essentially granting willthe platforms “editorial control” to maintain their own “community standards.” Thanks to those protections, advertising-driven platforms like YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, and thousands of smaller companies have flourished on the Web.

So why is Congress (and the DOJ) up in arms? Those on the left believe Section 230 has protected monopolists like Google and Amazon from responsibility for misinformation and other misdeeds on their platforms. Those on the right believe those same companies hide behind Section 230 so they can censor right-wing ideology. Confused? You’re not alone. Views on Section 230 are like the proverbial elephant and the blind man – what you see depends where you stand. So while there’s plenty of energy behind the idea of revising (or even repealing) Section 230 – there’s precious little agreement on how to do it.

Not surprisingly, most Internet companies would prefer to maintain the status quo. And none of this would likely matter were it not for one crucial fact: Thanks to Section 230, advertising on “user-generated content” platforms has become the lifeblood of the global economy. Internet companies are critical go-to-market partners for every company in the world – and if Section 230 is revised or repealed, everyone’s marketing practices could be dramatically impacted. 

To understand why, consider the algorithms that make your advertising work. With names like PMax (Google) and Advantage (Meta), these systems use AI, complex mathematics, and trillions of data points to determine who will see your ad, when, and – with creative optimization – even what the ad looks like. These systems are essentially black boxes – you put in your budget, creative, and goals, and presto – the system spits out results.

But here’s the rub: none of these systems work without editorial content from users like you and me – the very same content that so inflames both the left and the right. Over the past two decades, large platforms have optimized that content towards a “push” model: You see what the platform wants you to see. Because these systems are deeply entangled with the platform’s opaque advertising systems, the content you see supports the ad model you use. These content recommendation engines are just as opaque as their advertising counterparts, but in short, there’s a reason you’re seeing the content you’re seeing, and it has to do with one thing: optimizing for advertising success.

At the heart of all this is the concept of editorial expression. Do platforms only exercise “editorial expression” when moderating or removing extreme content? Maybe not. The algorithms determining what content you see when you log in to Meta, TikTok, X, or YouTube certainly could be seen as expressing editorial judgment – and many policy analysts are starting to argue exactly that point.

Regardless of where you stand, reform is coming for Section 230. The important question then becomes this: What’s the best path forward? 

It may prove disruptive at first, but here’s my preferred solution: Clarify Section 230 to separate algorithmic choices made by platforms from the content posted by its users. The former should not be protected by Section 230. The latter absolutely should. Platform companies who feed us rivers of algorithmically tuned content are, without a doubt, editorial actors. They should be treated as such by the law. 

How will this impact the algorithms so deeply integrated into our content experience? It’s hard to be definitive, but it will certainly force big platforms to clarify the choices they make as they feed consumers content. That, in turn, will mean marketers must become more aware of – and more responsible for – how their dollars impact our information ecosystem.