Everyone Hates Section 230. But the Internet Still Needs It.

What with war in Ukraine, Ron DeSantis using migrants for a campaign PR stunt, Trump’s legal travails, and devastating hurricanes, it’s not that surprising that one of the most important legal decisions in recent memory has gone largely unnoticed. The decision by a three-judge panel for the Fifth Circuit, which I wrote about for Fast Company last week, upheld HB20, a Texas law that prohibits large social-media platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, from doing almost any content moderation at all, aside from banning things like porn, explicit violence or incitement to violence, and harassment.

What that means, in simple terms, is that social-media platforms cannot ban Nazis or racists or trolls or anyone else, no matter how obnoxious or objectionable the content they generate is, and no matter how unpleasant they make the user experience on these platforms.

The decision is a very bad one in legal terms, as I wrote about and as Mike Masnick explained very well in a piece for TechDirt. To begin with, it denies social-media companies their 1st Amendment right not to have publish content they don’t approve of, and indeed compels them to publish content they find objectionable. On top of this, the decision contradicts Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which explicitly gives Internet…