By Christina Maas – Reclaim The Net
A proposal in the US Senate titled the Sunset Section 230 Act seeks to dismantle one of the core protections that has shaped the modern internet.
Put forward by Senator Lindsey Graham with bipartisan backing from Senators Dick Durbin, Josh Hawley, Amy Klobuchar, and Richard Blumenthal, the bill would repeal Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, a provision that has, for nearly thirty years, shielded online platforms from liability for the actions of their users.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
Under the plan, Section 230 would be fully repealed two years after the bill’s passage.
This short transition period would force websites, social platforms, and hosting services to rethink how they handle public interaction.
The current statute stops courts from holding online platforms legally responsible as the publishers of material shared by their users.
Its protection has been instrumental in allowing everything from local discussion boards to global platforms such as YouTube and Wikipedia to operate without being sued over every user comment or upload.
The legislation’s text removes Section 230 entirely and makes “conforming amendments” across multiple federal laws.
“I am extremely pleased that there is such wide and deep bipartisan support for repealing Section 230, which protects social media companies from being sued by the people whose lives they destroy.
Giant social media platforms are unregulated, immune from lawsuits, and are making billions of dollars in advertising revenue off some of the most unsavory content and criminal activity imaginable,” said Senator Graham.
“It is past time to allow those who have been harmed by these behemoths to have their day in court.”
Senator Graham’s statement reflects growing political hostility toward Section 230, but the premise behind his argument collapses under close examination of how the law actually functions.
The idea that repealing Section 230 would meaningfully hold large tech platforms accountable misunderstands both the legal structure of the internet and the purpose of the statute.
Section 230 does not grant “immunity” in the sense that companies cannot be sued for their own actions. Platforms can and routinely are sued for violating federal criminal law, intellectual property rights, or contractual obligations.
What the statute prevents is liability for speech created by its users.
Without that safeguard, every website hosting user comments, reviews, or uploads would risk litigation for each post. A total repeal would not just affect Facebook or YouTube; it would reach tiny community forums, news sites with comment sections, local businesses that host user feedback, and nonprofit educational networks.
The senator’s claim that platforms are “unregulated” also misses the regulatory reality.
These companies already operate under extensive regimes such as privacy laws, consumer protection statutes, antitrust oversight, and criminal prohibitions. Section 230 does not exempt them from any of these. Instead, it ensures that the legal responsibility for online speech remains with the speaker, an essential distinction for protecting open communication.
The notion that repealing the law would “allow those who have been harmed to have their day in court” ignores the consequence that every user would become a potential source of liability.
Faced with such risk, platforms would have no practical choice but to prescreen or block vast categories of lawful expression to avoid any potential lawsuits.
The outcome would not be a fairer digital environment but a heavily censored one, where only the most risk-averse, well-funded entities could afford to host public dialogue.
From a free speech perspective, Section 230 is the legal backbone that allows a diverse internet to exist. It protects the capacity of ordinary people to speak, organize, and publish online without requiring corporate pre-approval.
Dismantling it in the name of punishing “behemoths” would primarily hurt small and mid-sized sites that lack armies of lawyers. Rather than empowering individuals, a repeal would consolidate control of online discourse in the hands of a few large companies capable of absorbing the new legal exposure.
Senator Blackburn’s claim that Big Tech uses Section 230 “to censor conservative voices” misunderstands both the law and the First Amendment.
Section 230 does not require or authorize any specific content decision. It simply prevents lawsuits over moderation choices, whether those affect conservative, liberal, or apolitical content.
Even though major social media platforms censored conservative voices over the last decade, repeal of Section 230 would not create political neutrality; it would compel platforms to err on the side of suppression, further constraining speech across the spectrum.
Senator Blumenthal’s suggestion that companies “hide behind Section 230 to dodge accountability” overlooks existing accountability mechanisms. Platforms can already be sued for their own misconduct, such as defective design, deceptive practices, or failure to comply with federal reporting obligations.
Section 230 only blocks suits that attempt to treat a platform as the publisher of another person’s speech, a boundary drawn to preserve open dialogue while still permitting enforcement of genuine legal violations.
Graham went further on Fox News: “These platforms are doing enormous damage to our country, pushing people to suicide and selling fentanyl-laced pills and tablets,” Graham said.
“It is long past time to open up the American courtroom to those who have been harmed by this out-of-control system, and to finally have regulations and accountability for the largest businesses in the history of the country. The courthouse doors are closed, and there is no meaningful regulation.”
Senator Graham’s argument combines real public concerns with a deeply mistaken premise about how the internet and US law operate.
The harms he lists, suicide, drug trafficking, and unregulated digital power, are serious, but none of them exist because of Section 230.
The law he seeks to repeal is not what “closes the courthouse doors.” It is what keeps those doors from being used to silence lawful speech or destroy the open nature of online communication.
First, the claim that “these platforms are doing enormous damage” rests on conflating correlation with causation.
While social media may amplify allegedly “harmful” behavior, the existence of such content is not created by Section 230.
The statute does not encourage or condone drug sales, harassment, or suicide-related material; it merely allocates legal responsibility correctly.
Those who sell drugs or post illegal content are still fully liable under state and federal law. Section 230 does not obstruct prosecution or civil claims against the individuals and organizations that commit these crimes.
Second, the idea that repealing Section 230 would “open up the American courtroom” ignores what that would mean in practice.
Courts would indeed become more accessible to plaintiffs suing any website, app, or forum where another person’s illegal act occurred. A grieving parent, for instance, could sue not only the perpetrator but also the hosting service, the software developer, or even a search engine that indexed a link.
Each suit would require platforms to defend themselves against the speech of third parties, regardless of whether they had any knowledge or control over the content.
The result would be a legal system flooded with claims that punish the medium rather than the offender.
Third, the suggestion that “there is no meaningful regulation” is inaccurate. Major platforms are already bound by extensive federal and state oversight: data privacy laws, advertising regulations, antitrust enforcement, securities disclosure rules, and criminal statutes concerning child exploitation and narcotics.
Federal agencies, including the DEA and FBI, routinely use digital evidence hosted by platforms to be able to arrest and prosecute those selling fentanyl online.
The existence of Section 230 does not limit these prosecutions; it ensures that intermediaries can cooperate with law enforcement without becoming liable for every crime that passes across their networks.
If Section 230 were repealed, platforms would not become more accountable; they would become more restrictive.
Legal exposure would force them to monitor and filter user activity on an unprecedented scale, removing controversial, sensitive, or even tragic personal content to avoid potential lawsuits.
Far from opening access to justice, this would chill public discussion of addiction, mental health, and other social crises.
What Senator Graham calls an “out-of-control system” is in fact an information ecosystem dependent on a single legal distinction: that people are responsible for what they say, and that the conduit carrying their speech is not the publisher of it. Erasing that line will not prevent tragedy. It will only replace open networks with a censored and legally paralyzed internet where fewer people dare to speak at all.