![]() Senators Roger Wicker (R-Miss), Lindsey Graham, (R-S.C) and Marsha Blackburn, (R-Tenn) would “condition the content moderation liability shield on an objective reasonableness standard. The new Online Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity Act from U.S. But a law proposed by the trio of Republican senators takes CDA 230 in the other direction, by requiring services not to censor what they might consider to be objectionable speech. The House’s Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), and the Senate bill, Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), signed into law by President Trump in 2018, requires services to police content having to do with possible sexual exploitation of children, including banning ads for consensual prostitution between adults on the theory that it could involve children. The other irony is that the law has been challenged from both sides. Ironically, for a law intended to censor the internet, Section 230 protected companies from being forced to censor their users by declaring that ISPs are not publishers and not “legally responsible for what others say and do.” But there is another clause in CDA 230 that empowers online services (there was no social media at the time) to do what private companies have always done to keep their house in order by “protecting their right to any “action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.” ![]() The CDA was designed to ban material deemed “harmful to children” but was overturned by the Supreme Court mostly on first amendment grounds. ![]() That law was the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996, and the part being challenged by Trump and this pending bill is Section 230.
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