Otherwise Objectionable: When Congress Ridiculously Tried Merging Censorship With Freedom
Moral panics come and go, but stupid legislation is forever. At least until the Supreme Court steps in. This week on Otherwise Objectionable, my podcast series about Section 230, we talk about how the moral panic over “porn” online, including Senator James Exon’s infamous blue binder of internet porn, caused the Senate to pass a horrifying censorship bill that would have required the internet be as clean as Sesame Street.
Enter Representatives Chris Cox and Ron Wyden, who recognized that Exon’s approach wasn’t just unconstitutional — it fundamentally misunderstood how the internet worked. Instead of trying to turn every website into PBS Kids, they proposed something radical: trust users to make their own choices about what content they wanted to see, and protect the platforms that gave users those tools.
Their proposal, which would become Section 230, was based on a simple premise: the internet would work better if we empowered users rather than censors. Want to keep your kids away from adult content? Great — here are tools to do that. Want to create a family-friendly platform? Fantastic — you won’t get sued for trying. Want to build a more open platform? Also fine — you won’t get sued for that either.
This approach was such obvious common sense that it sailed through the House with overwhelming bipartisan support. But then congressional efficiency (or perhaps laziness) kicked in. Rather than reconcile the House and Senate approaches, leadership simply merged the bills together. The result? Section 230, a law designed to promote free speech and user choice, became part of the Communications Decency Act, a law designed to censor the internet into bland submission.
The supreme irony is that when the Supreme Court inevitably struck down most of the CDA as unconstitutional, Section 230 was the only part that survived. The provision that was never meant to be part of the censorship bill turned out to be its only lasting legacy. As Congress once again rushes to “protect the children” through ham-handed internet regulation, it’s worth remembering how the last moral panic resulted in terrible unconstitutional nonsense, that accidentally got merged with the very protection that makes a free and open internet possible.