For the last three decades, internet giants have been able to avoid legal exposure for content on their platforms, thanks to a law that differentiates the companies from online publishers. But those safeguards appear to be weakening.
and Google
, which dominate the U.S. digital ad market, find themselves as defendants in a host of lawsuits that collectively serve to undermine the long-held notion that they have legal protection for what surfaces on their sites, apps and services. Companies like TikTok and Snap are in the same predicament.
The unifying aspect of the recent cases is that they’re crafted to circumvent Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which Congress passed in 1996 and President Bill Clinton signed into law. Established in the early days of the internet, the law protects websites from being sued over content posted by their users, and allows them to act as moderators without being held liable for what stays up.
Last week, a jury in New Mexico found Meta liable in a case involving child safety, while jurors in Los Angeles held the Facebook parent and Google’s YouTube negligent in a personal injury trial. Days after those verdicts were revealed, victims of the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein filed a class action lawsuit against Google and the Trump administration over allegations related to the wrongful disclosure of personal information.
