EFF Continued to Champion Users’ Online Speech and Fought Efforts to Curtail It: 2024 in Review

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People’s ability to speak online, share ideas, and advocate for change are enabled by the countless online services that host everyone’s views.

Despite the central role these online services play in our digital lives, lawmakers and courts spent the last year trying to undermine a key U.S. law, Section 230, that enables services to host our speech. EFF was there to fight back on behalf of all internet users.

Section 230 (47 U.S.C. § 230) is not an accident. Congress passed the law in 1996 because it recognized that for users’ speech to flourish online, services that hosted their speech needed to be protected from legal claims based on any particular user’s speech. The law embodies the principle that everyone, including the services themselves, should be responsible for their own speech, but not the speech of others. This critical but limited legal protection reflects a careful balance by Congress, which at the time recognized that promoting more user speech outweighed the harm caused by any individual’s unlawful speech.

EFF helps thwart effort to repeal Section 230

Members of Congress introduced a bill in May this year that would have repealed Section 230 in 18 months, on the theory that the deadline would motivate lawmakers to come up with a different legal framework in the meantime. Yet the lawmakers behind the effort provided no concrete alternatives to Section 230, nor did they identify any specific parts of the law they believed needed to be changed. Instead, the lawmakers were motivated by their and the public’s justifiable dissatisfaction with the largest online services.

As we wrote at the time, repealing Section 230 would be a disaster for internet users and the small, niche online services that make up the diverse forums and communities that host speech about nearly every interest, religious and political persuasion, and topic. Section 230 protects bloggers, anyone who forwards an email, and anyone who reposts or otherwise recirculates the posts of other users. The law al

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