From Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois:

U.S. Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) today introduced the Sunset Section 230 Act, which would repeal Section 230 two years after the date of enactment so that those harmed online can bring legal action against companies and finally hold them accountable for the harms that occur on their platforms.

“Children are being exploited and abused because Big Tech consistently prioritizes profits over people. Enough is enough. Sunsetting Section 230 will force Big Tech to come to the table take ownership over the harms it has wrought. And if Big Tech doesn’t, this bill will open the courtroom to victims of its platforms. Parents have been begging Congress to step in, and it’s time we do so. I’m proud to partner with Senator Graham on this effort, and we will push for it to become law,” said Durbin.

One of my favorite words of 2025 has been “slopulism,” a portmanteau of “slop” and “populism.” I don’t think all American populist movements are slopulism (Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, Democrat of New York, is an example of a good populist campaign), but many of them are. Slopulism particularly manifests itself in anti-tech, anti-artificial intelligence sentiment not rooted in fact. It’s a truth that generative artificial intelligence was trained without the permission of writers and artists. It is false to say generative AI is some kind of great catastrophe to the environment. Inference is remarkably cheap and efficient, and scientists are working to make pre-training more sustainable every day. It is true to say AI data centers do not contribute to local economies; it is false to assert they’re useless. Populism versus slopulism.

To that end, Durbin and Graham’s legislative joke is entirely slopulism. Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934 gives platforms legal immunity over what their users say on those platforms. For instance, if a person encourages someone to commit suicide on X or Instagram, the deceased person’s family cannot sue the platforms for any wrongdoing. They can sue the other person, but the platforms are shielded. It is a hard, important line between user speech and company speech. Per the First Amendment, it is legal to say anything on the internet, and Section 230 maintains that right by giving platforms the liberty to moderate speech however they want.

Some platforms, like 4chan, the anonymous image board, refuse to do any meaningful content moderation unless the speech is explicitly illegal, e.g., child sexual abuse material. Other platforms, like Snapchat or Discord, engage in more active content moderation. But the commonality between all of these platforms is that these moderation decisions belong to the platforms themselves. They’re legally protected from most civil lawsuits, allowing a high degree of free speech on the internet. (And yes, contrary to people like Elon Musk, the internet is predominantly a free place.) This is all thanks to Section 230.

If Section 230 is removed, anyone — whether malicious or well-meaning — could sue platforms for their content moderation decisions. This is highly unprecedented and would result in a major crackdown on free speech on the American internet. Platforms would begin heavily censoring user-generated content in an attempt to prevent lawsuits, to the point of employing automated systems to instantly remove a person’s account if they’re deemed even slightly risky to the platform. Overnight, all users would become the platforms’ legal liability.

Platforms must be given some immunity against accountability because a poor moderation decision shouldn’t be punished like a crime. It would be like punishing a gun company for every single gun-involved homicide in America. As much as I don’t like the firearm lobby, that’s complete lunacy. It goes against the very core of the First Amendment. It should not be illegal to run communication platforms in the United States, and if it is, those platforms will no longer be used for any intellectual debate or legally murky conversations. Suing companies is trivial in the United States, yet communication platforms on the internet have been shielded from this lawfare to promote freedom of speech. Only a tech-illiterate person would risk that sanctity the internet has historically enjoyed.