01/12/2024

Courts are Chipping Away at a Law Upon Which the Internet was Built

Section 230 is getting weaker

Carrie Goldberg has been waiting a while for this moment. A New York-based victim's rights attorney, Goldberg has spent years taking tech firms to court over a range of alleged abuses of their platforms—from stalking and harassment to revenge porn and other online privacy violations. It's been a tough gig: For nearly three decades, the law known as Section 230 has shielded online platforms from lawsuits that try to hold them liable for the content that their users post. That's made it relatively simple—too simple, Goldberg would argue—for the companies she takes on to get their cases dismissed quickly, no matter how horrifying the underlying accusations may be.

"We don't even get to pass the starting point," Goldberg said. But lately, that's begun to change.

Just this month, Snap lost its motion to dismiss a case in which Goldberg is representing families who say their children died after overdosing on pills laced with fentanyl that they purchased via Snapchat. In October, a California state court rejected an attempt by Snap, Meta, Google and TikTok to dismiss another slew of cases that charge the companies with negligence and addicting kids to their platforms in a way that causes harm. A month later, a federal judge allowed a similar multidistrict litigation in federal court to proceed. And, after failing to get a sex trafficking case also filed by Goldberg dismissed in Oregon, the online chat service Omegle shut down completely in November.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Fast Company.