Today marks an unusual anniversary, not of a person, but of 26 words that built the modern internet. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act turns 30 this year, and it’s done something remarkable: It’s allowed American innovation and free expression to flourish in ways nobody could have predicted three decades ago.
The provision is straightforward. It shields online platforms, from Facebook to your church’s message board, from being sued over content their users post. Section 230 recognizes the basic principle that publishers are responsible for what they publish, but platforms can’t be liable for every word that passes through their servers.
Section 230’s 30th birthday won’t be happy, though. Critics from both sides showed up with knives instead of cake. The left claims the liability shield allows platforms to spread misinformation. The right says it enables censorship of conservative voices. Neither side grasps that gutting Section 230 won’t fix their complaints; it’ll just strangle what’s left of digital freedom.
Without Section 230, there is no YouTube. No Wikipedia. No Reddit, Substack, or Truth Social. No comment sections, no user reviews, no social media as we know it. These 26 words created the legal foundation for the participatory internet, the version where Americans don’t just consume content, but they also create it, share it, and argue about it. Section 230 is why a teenager in Kansas can post a video that reaches millions, why grassroots movements organize online, and why alternatives to legacy media exist at all.
Here’s what Section 230 actually does: It encourages platforms to take a light-touch approach to content moderation instead of playing censor. Rather than being forced to take down content under threat of a lawsuit, platforms are provided with legal immunity for user-generated content, allowing them to leave it up. And yes, that means Americans encounter ideas they agree with, ideas they don’t, and occasionally ideas that are awful but lawful. That’s the point. Free societies don’t curate their citizens’ intellectual diet. They trust people to think for themselves.
Kill Section 230 and every platform, from X to your kid’s PTA forum, faces a simple calculation: Any post could mean a lawsuit. The response won’t be carefully moderated. It’ll be a paranoid pre-screening of everything.
Picture an internet where your vacation photos need compliance approval before posting. Where breaking news crawls through legal review. Where grassroots movements die in content moderation queues because platforms can’t risk the liability. That’s not hypothetical; it’s the inevitable result of holding platforms liable for user speech.
And here’s the kicker conservatives keep missing: Section 230 is the only reason alternatives to Big Tech exist. Truth Social? Rumble? Parler? They survive because Section 230 protects them from lawsuit bankruptcy. Kill it, and you kill every refuge that conservatives built to escape Big Tech censorship, forcing everyone back to the very platforms they fled.
The real winners in a world without Section 230? Meta, Google, X, the giants with legal war chests deep enough to survive endless litigation. Gutting Section 230 won’t humble Big Tech. It’ll entrench its market power by destroying every start-up competitor before they launch.
Section 230 has spent 30 years enabling free expression, competition, and individual liberty — everything conservatives claim to champion. It created an internet where Americans can actually speak, build alternatives to large technology companies, and engage with ideas without permission slips.
These 26 words deserve better than fair-weather friends at their birthday party. They deserve a vigorous defense, not because they’re perfect, but because their replacements would be infinitely worse. Conservatives used to understand that freedom is messy and uncomfortable.
So happy 30th, Section 230. Here’s to surviving another three decades, assuming lawmakers don’t blow out your candles first.
