from the not-meant-for-this-moment dept
At the exact moment when Donald Trump and his MAGA allies are actively dismantling democratic institutions and working to silence critics, a group of Democratic Senators have decided to collaborate with Trump’s supporters to make it easier to censor speech online.
As reported in The Information (paywalled), several Democratic Senators are teaming up with some of Trump’s strongest Senate allies to repeal Section 230 — the law that both enables content moderation and protects websites from being sued into oblivion for hosting user speech.
They appear to be doing this out of a deep misunderstanding of how the law works combined with an astounding naiveté about how this process will be used by the MAGA faithful.
As early as next week, Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican, plan to introduce a bill that would set an expiration date of Jan. 1, 2027, for Section 230, according to a congressional aide familiar with the bill’s development. The senators have wide-ranging support from their respective parties: Republicans Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn and Democrats Sheldon Whitehouse and Amy Klobuchar have agreed to co-sponsor the bill. And two more Democrats, Richard Blumenthal and Peter Welch, have discussed joining as co-sponsors.
If all goes according to plan, Durbin and Graham’s proposal would be the first bipartisan bill introduced in Congress that could repeal what’s often lauded as the 26 words that created the internet.
To understand just how dangerous this move is, consider a law that Senator Amy Klobuchar — one of the supporters of this new bill — pushed just a few years ago. In 2021, she introduced legislation to amend Section 230 in a way that would allow the Health & Human Services Secretary to designate certain online content as “health misinformation,” requiring websites to remove it.
Consider what that would mean in practice: Today’s Health & Human Services Secretary is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who believes the solution to measles is to have more children die of measles. Under Klobuchar’s proposal, he would literally have the power to declare pro-vaccine information as “misinformation” and force it off the internet. We warned Klobuchar about this, but apparently the lesson didn’t stick.
And that was just one narrow carve-out to Section 230. Now these Senators want to remove all protections entirely.
Last year, Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Frank Pallone introduced a similar bill in the House. Like that one, this new plan is essentially legislative extortion: put a sunset date on Section 230 to magically “force big tech to come to the table” to negotiate “something better.”
Or, as law professor Eric Goldman’s meme made clear last year, it’s taking the internet hostage:
The fundamental problem here is that these Senators don’t understand what Section 230 actually does — or how its repeal would make their stated goals harder to achieve. Take the lead Democrat on this bill, Senator Dick Durbin, who has long demonstrated his confusion about the law. Just this week, in an interview with Capitol Fax (an Illinois political newsletter whose design is even more outdated than Techdirt’s!) Durbin doubled down on his misunderstanding, revealing exactly how his confusion could lead to disaster:
Isabel Miller: A first amendment lawyer said your plan to sunset Section 230 would stifle free speech. A reporter said that it would destroy the open internet. And my boss said that if 230 was repealed, it would put his website out of business. Why do you want to do this?
Sen. Durbin: Because of the sexual exploitation on the internet.
Isabel: Aren’t there rules in place to stop that already?
Sen. Durbin: Section 230 says the following: If your teenage daughter is exploited with images which I can’t even describe here, on the internet, and she discovers it to her horror and goes to that internet, social media source and said, ‘take them down,’ there is no legal obligation for them to do so. Why? Because Section 230 says they can’t be held liable for continuing to broadcast this filth at the expense of this poor girl and her family. That’s why 230 has to be revisited. 20 years ago, it might have made sense. It doesn’t make sense now. There is no reason why the people on the internet should get away with this, and what we say is, if they want to do that, then they’re subject to being sued. I think that will slow down the trafficking in this terrible sexploitation.
Durbin’s response perfectly encapsulates how dangerous this misunderstanding is. He claims Section 230 prevents websites from being held accountable for “exploitation,” when in reality:
- Every major platform already has robust policies for removing non-consensual intimate imagery, supported by industry-wide programs like NCMEC’s Take It Down system and StopNCII‘s hashing database.
- These removal systems exist because of Section 230, which explicitly protects platforms when they take down harmful content, making it reasonable for sites to make use of these efforts. Without 230’s protections, platforms would face increased liability risks for any moderation attempts.
- Most critically, Durbin confuses the actual criminals (who can and should be prosecuted) with the tools they misuse. It’s like blaming the phone company for criminal conspiracies plotted over phone lines.
This isn’t just academic confusion — it’s the kind of fundamental misunderstanding that could give the Trump administration unprecedented power to control online speech.
The timing here is what makes this move particularly baffling — and dangerous. At the exact moment when Trump and his allies are systematically dismantling democratic institutions and attempting to silence critics, these Democratic Senators want to hand them an incredibly powerful censorship tool.
Here’s what repealing Section 230 would actually do: remove the law that explicitly protects websites when they resist government pressure to censor speech. Without those protections, the Trump administration would have far more leverage to force platforms to remove content they don’t like — whether that’s criticism of Trump, exposure of corruption, or information about voting rights. It can also allow them to pressure websites to host pro-MAGA or pro-Nazi content that sites might not wish to associate with.
Think that’s hyperbole? Consider what’s already happening with all of the various attacks on the media and even law firms that have supported Democratic causes.
Repealing Section 230 entirely would simply give the administration even more power to control online speech. It would give the Trump administration incredible latitude to censor any kind of content they dislike, even if that content would nominally be protected under the First Amendment. I explained why in a thread on Bluesky, that details how the removal of Section 230 would make it way, way more expensive for any website to defend decisions to leave certain content up, even if they’d win on First Amendment grounds.
With Section 230, if a website (or a user!) wants to defend its right to keep content up (or take it down), winning such a case typically costs around $100,000. Without those protections, even if you’d ultimately win on First Amendment grounds, you’re looking at about $2 million in legal fees. For Meta or Google, that’s a rounding error. For a small news site or blog, it’s potentially fatal. And this includes users who simply forward an email or retweet something they saw. Section 230 protects them as well, but without it, they’re at the whims of legal threats.
And that’s exactly the point. When the cost of defending your editorial choices becomes existential, you don’t defend them at all. You take down whatever the powerful want taken down. You host whatever they insist you host. The First Amendment might technically protect you, but that protection becomes meaningless if you can’t afford to prove it in court.
The dumbest part of this is that while these Senators will likely claim they are doing this to punish “big tech,” this would actually strengthen Meta and Google’s dominance. While smaller sites shut down rather than risk bankruptcy from legal fees, Meta or Google can easily absorb those same costs. It’s as if these Senators looked at the internet’s consolidation problem and decided the solution was… more consolidation.
Which brings us back to the core question: how could these Democratic Senators support a plan that would simultaneously give Donald Trump unprecedented censorship powers while also consolidating Meta’s control over online speech?
The evidence suggests they simply don’t understand what they’re doing. Each of these Senators has a documented history of fundamental confusion about Section 230 and how the internet works:
- Richard Blumenthal has been getting Section 230 wrong since his days as Connecticut’s AG in the early 2000s.
- Sheldon Whitehouse’s chapter on free speech revealed such profound confusion about Section 230 that it’s hard to believe he’s actually read the law.
- We’ve already covered Durbin and Klobuchar’s dangerous misunderstandings.
This isn’t just about being wrong on tech policy anymore. These Senators are about to hand Trump and his allies exactly what they need to silence opposition and control the online conversation. Whether through ignorance or incompetence, they’re actively undermining the democratic institutions they claim to protect.
The cynical read would be that they’re in league with Trump. The more likely explanation is that they simply don’t care enough to have thought through the implications of what they’re doing. But at this particular moment in history, that level of cluelessness might actually be worse.
If these Democratic Senators truly want to protect democracy from Trump’s authoritarian impulses, they need to wake up fast. Because right now, they’re doing his censorship work for him.
If not, they should get out of the way for others who actually understand both the moment and the law.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, amy klobuchar, content moderation, dick durbin, lindsey graham, richard blumenthal, section 230, sheldon whitehouse, sunset 230
