Pluralistic: Without CDA 230, Facebook will own the internet forever (05 Nov 2026)


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Without CDA 230, Facebook will own the internet forever (permalink)

The road to hell is paved with the depraved indifference to badly considered tech policy. The internet is one of those charismatic hyperobjects that wraps around our lives in myriad ways, so tech policy changes have a big blast radius.

This isn't a counsel of despair. I firmly believe that we can make tech policy, and furthermore, that we must, but that policy has to be crafted in a way that's mindful of collateral damage.

Take scraping. Most creative workers are rightly furious at the palpable glee of tech bosses, who want to take everything we've made in order to train models whose express purpose is to destroy our livelihoods and transfer our wages to AI companies and the media companies they sell to.

This is an entirely correct thing to be angry about. But many of my peers and comrades think the answer to this is to ban scraping, which is a terrible idea.

Scraping is how we make search engines. If you want Google to be the last search engine we ever get then by all means, change the rules so you need licenses to make transient copies of the web. There's only one company with deep-enough pockets to secure permission from every web site operator: Google, the thrice-convicted monopolist that dominates the web so thoroughly that no one could afford to turn them down.

Scraping is how we glue down the web's shifting sands. If you want to understand why the web says something today, it helps to know what it said yesterday. If we want to know how Zuck and Musk's algorithms are peddling disinformation and hatred, we need to be able to scrape their feeds. If we want to know how Amazon uses surveillance data to price-gouge shoppers, we need to scrape its prices. If we want to know how Uber cheats its most economically desperate drivers with lowball wage offers, we need to scrape its job listings.

(It's possible to make a scraper that's so clumsy or aggressive that it crashes or destroys websites. That's a dick move. We should find people who do that and punish them; and the thing we should punish them for is trashing websites – not making transient copies of the data on those sites.)

(If you want to protect creative livelihoods from AI bosses, the answer lies in labor organizing, not more copyright:)

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/21/off-the-menu/#universally-loathed

The point is that while tech bosses are some of the worst, most eminently guillotineable monsters history has produced, tech is important to the lives of billions of perfectly nice people. If you let your rage at tech bosses overwhelm your care for those everyday people, you risk coming up with "punishments" that end up benefiting Big Tech and wrecking the lives of those normal users.

For example: you may have heard people insist that we can solve our problems with Big Tech by "repealing Section 230." This is a reference to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 26-word law that makes users responsible for their speech, while insulating the platforms that facilitate that speech from liability:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

Here's what that means: say one user accuses another user of violating their rights through their words (libelling them, invading their privacy, etc). The wronged party can sue the person they're accusing of harming them, but they can't sue the social media platform, message board provider, hosting company, DNS provider (etc etc) for their role in hosting and transmitting the unlawful speech.

At the same time, CDA 230 allows all these "intermediaries" (social media platforms, hosting companies, message board providers, etc etc) to take down or otherwise moderate content that they deem offensive, without creating an obligation to police all of their users' speech.

CDA 230 grew out of lawsuits in the 1990s where online companies that took any action to remove offensive or unlawful speech were thereafter obliged to take down all unlawful speech. The lawfulness or unlawfulness of speech isn't something you can easily determine: for example, determining whether one user libeled another user requires that you find out whether the allegedly libelous speech is true. There's no way that a forum moderator can know that – it's the kind of thing you need a judge, a jury and a trial to figure out.

The result of these lawsuits was that most platforms decided they wouldn't take down any speech (so as to avoid creating an obligation to police all user speech), while a minority of platforms simply removed anything that anyone might find offensive. It was a mess:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prodigy_Services_Co.

CDA 230 fixed that. CDA 230 is how an individual or a small organization can host its own Mastodon or Bluesky servers, its own message boards, etc. It's these "smallhosts" that are the primary beneficiaries of CDA 230, not the Big Tech companies that 230's opponents hope to target by reforming or repealing 230.

Big Tech would be happy to see CDA 230 repealed. Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly called for CDA 230 to be deleted, because he thinks that Meta could hire enough moderators (or use enough AI) that they could avoid being ensnared in a lot of frivolous litigation, and when legal threats did land, Zuck's army of lawyers could readily see them off:

https://cepr.net/publications/repealing-section-230-giving-mark-zuckerberg-what-he-wants/

Big Tech's biggest fear isn't a repeal of CDA 230: it's mass defection of its users to smaller, independent services that are more responsive to users' needs. Zuck doesn't care if we get a new law that would make it impossible for another #MeToo to take off!

This is on my mind this week because of the way that intermediary liability has nearly destroyed an online community that I helped found, way back in the early 1990s.

The community is a small arts organization that I joined as a teenager. The organization sent out a quarterly newsletter, which I devoured as soon as it arrived in my mailbox. I wanted more! A few years in, I had the idea of setting up an email list for the org. Another member had access to a server where we could host the list, and now, more than 30 years later, that list is still going strong.

Now, every small community has its cranks and trolls, and this one is no exception. One member in particular has a well-earned reputation for flying off the handle, showering anyone who disagrees with them with furious and obscene abuse (I've been on the receiving end of this abuse myself). Unsurprisingly, this person is also an inveterate culture warrior who can be relied upon to troll anyone who brings up racial or gender issues. When this trolling draws the inevitable critical response, this person then reverts to form, showering their critics with abuse and profanity.

The list is moderated, and the organization's code of conduct is used as a framework for the moderators' calls. Like most codes of conduct, this org's CoC includes some generalities that leave room for interpretation (basically, "Don't be a dick").

A moderation policy that allows the moderators to sanction users for flaming each other and a user who picks fights and then launches into unhinged tirades at the mildest of criticisms were always going to collide, and that's what happened with this user. After picking a fight over racist language, this user posted a bunch of racial epithets and got sanctioned for posting racist language.

That's when the user sued the organization's volunteer board members for libel for implying that they were racist, seeking tens of thousands of dollars in damages, far in excess of the org's cash reserves. The org stepped in to defend its board members, and even though this trollish member quickly folded their legal threat, mounting just that initial defense incinerated a sizable fraction of the org's total assets.

This is the thing that CDA 230 was designed to prevent. Even spurious legal threats can wipe out small, volunteer-run communities. In the 30 years since I founded this list, there have been a couple times when members tried to convince the organization to move it to Facebook or another Big Tech platform. Each time, the rest of us were able to rebuff those efforts, and today the list continues to be independently operated.

If this one belligerent jerk had held out for just a little longer, that would have been the end of this community – not just the mailing list, but the organization itself.

We can't have an indieweb without limited liability for intermediaries. Repealing CDA 230 won't hurt Facebook – it will just force every independent community to move there.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Dutch cops bombard stolen phones with SMSes https://web.archive.org/web/20011106210234/https://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/171836.html

#20yrsago Levy’s Perfect Thing: eye-opening iPod book https://memex.craphound.com/2006/11/05/levys-perfect-thing-eye-opening-ipod-book/

#20yrsago Army recruiters to students: “Iraq war is over” https://abcnews.com/GMA/story?id=2626032&page=1

#15yrsago Occupier/Army Ranger in ICU: Oakland PD “jumped me” https://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/04/us-protests-oakland-veteran-idUSTRE7A37A820111104/

#15yrsago Prisoner’s toothpick replicas of Final Fantasy weapons https://web.archive.org/web/20111105071751/https://www.geekosystem.com/prisoner-builds-final-fantasy-swords-matchsticks/

#10yrsago Canadians are getting “blackmailed” by US copyright trolls https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/copyright-infringement-notice-canada-piracy-1.3831492

#10yrsago Eleanor & Park: a terrifying YA romance that has rescued its readers and frightened their parents https://memex.craphound.com/2016/11/05/eleanor-park-a-terrifying-ya-romance-that-has-rescued-its-readers-and-frightened-their-parents/

#10yrsago Chrome is about to start warning users that non-HTTPS sites are insecure https://www.wired.com/2016/11/googles-chrome-hackers-flip-webs-security-model/

#10yrsago Rebecca Solnit’s open letter to Trump: You should really visit New York some time https://lithub.com/new-york-city-is-a-book-conservatives-should-read/

#10yrsago The New York Times’s GOP voter-suppression retrogame: “The Voter Suppression Trail” https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/01/opinion/voting-suppression-videogame.html

#10yrsago Toronto Star compiles a comprehensive list of Trump’s election-season lies https://web.archive.org/web/20161105070153/https://www.thestar.com/news/world/uselection/2016/11/04/donald-trump-the-unauthorized-database-of-false-things.html

#1yrago "Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works" https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/05/xor-xand-xnor-nand-nor/#brawniac

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 511 (32924 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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