"“Are these sites exacerbating an already harmful situation. Yes,” said Woodrow Hartzog, a privacy law expert at Samford University. “But that doesn’t mean they should lose immunity.”
Section 230, he said, still provides important protections that keep the internet the free, open place that it is. “Twisting” laws like stolen property to keep information offline, he said, threatens the internet ecosystem.
“It’s not that there’s no legitimate harm here,” he said. “There certainly is. It’s that it’s a harm we’re still struggling to answer in the law.”
But this new lawsuit may be coming at a time of sea change in how the Internet treats the posting of embarrassing and illegal information. So-called “revenge porn” is being steadily driven off the Internet as platforms like Google and Reddit ban it. Could “revenge data” also be pushed offline? People like Danielle Citron have long called to rethink Section 230, which was authored in the early days of the commercial internet.
Entrepreneurs profiting off of a hack that wreaked havoc on millions of lives were not the people who Section 230 was dreamed up to protect. She said we need more robust protections for stolen data and a provision in the law to easily get it taken down.
“There’s such a wild west feel to all of this,” she said. “There’s stolen data sold and it’s marketed in this feeding frenzy of humiliation. What kind of civil society allows that?”"