26 Words: The Transformation of Section 230 Immunity for Technology Companies in U.S. Court

Section 230 is a foundational internet law from the 1996 Communications Decency Act that provides technology companies with the ability to moderate content on their platforms. Policymakers from both sides of the aisle have fallen out of love with Section 230 today, and as a result, there is an ongoing policy debate in Congress on how to proceed with regulating speech online. Applying social science methods to legal research, this paper explores a simple random sample of 181 federal Section 230 case decisions in the U.S. between 2010 and 2020 to determine how these case decisions have changed over time and provide policymakers with quantitative data to reference as they proceed with plans for reform. Focusing my study on Section 230 case decisions during an expansive time period for technological innovation, I provide the only empirical study of Section 230 case decisions between 2010 and 2020 in the existing scholarship today. I discuss how recent policy proposals can be categorized into three broader themes for reform: regulating accountability and transparency, targeting the section of the statute that gives technology companies their ability to moderate content, and incentivizing technology companies to moderate more aggressively. However, these proposal themes do not properly target the ways in which Section 230 operates in court; therefore, I conclude that there is a dissonance between the Section 230 legislative history over the past ten years and the most recent policy proposals for reforming the statute. My main findings show that there has been a drastic shift in the types of defendants in these cases since 2010, the majority of these case decisions revolve around a section of the statute that does not receive much attention in Congress, and narrowing existing immunity through carveout approaches is not the most effective solution for reform