A quarter of a century ago, in Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, Congress implemented “safe harbor” protections against legal liability for any content users post on social-media platforms. These platforms provide lots of benefits, of course, but since 1996 we’ve learned just how much social devastation they can also bring about. What we’ve learned, the authors write, makes it clear that Section 230 is desperately out of date and needs updating, to hold social-media platforms responsible for how their sites are designed and implemented.
Buy CopiesInternet social-media platforms are granted broad “safe harbor” protections against legal liability for any content users post on their platforms. Those protections, spelled out in Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA), were written a quarter century ago during a long-gone age of naïve technological optimism and primitive technological capabilities. So much has changed since the turn of the century that those protections are now desperately out of date. It’s time to rethink and revise those protections — and for all leaders whose companies rely on internet platforms to understand how their businesses might be affected.
Michael D. Smith is the J. Erik Jonsson professor of information technology and marketing at Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College and Tepper School of Business.
Marshall W. Van Alstyne is the Questrom Chaired Professor at Boston University Questrom School of Business. His work has more than 25,000 citations and he received the Thinkers50 Award for Best Digital Thinking. He coauthored Platform Revolution (W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), the April 2016 HBR article “Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rules of Strategy” and the October 2006 HBR article “Strategies for Two-Sided Markets,” an HBR all-time top 50.
