Many of you regular listeners know, I've been arguing that it's time to make changes to a law called Section 230.

For the new initiates among you, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 is the law that protects websites, apps, social media platforms, from lawsuits over posts made by their users.

It has shaped almost everything we experience on the Internet, for better and for worse.

Today on the show, a cautionary tale about what can go wrong when you tinker with this law.

I think it's time to update Section 230 for the powerful, algorithmic, and AI-driven internet of today,

to strip back the immunity that the law currently gives to tech companies,

who can more or less do what they want right now without the threat of being sued.

Now, there is one time when Congress did this.

In 2018, lawmakers rolled back a teeny bit of Section 230.

They did this with seemingly good intentions.

They were trying to stop websites from being used for terrible crimes.

But that ended up causing things to go bad in a different way.

It hurt a group of people who are already in a risky line of work, people in the sex industry.

This whole situation, it definitely gives me pause.

I'll say up front that it hasn't thrown me off my mission.

I still believe there's a way to reform Section 230 that can do more good than harm.

But the story of what happened when Congress did change the law slightly, you can't ignore it.

And in fact, there's plenty to learn from it about how trying to plug one leak on the Internet can spring another.

So today, we're going to hear from someone who lived through those consequences, a guy who was making a living on OnlyFans, whose life got harder

and more dangerous when Congress changed Section 230.

At that moment when, like, the money plummeted, how did it affect your life?

Well, like, I guess urgency. It's like, what am I going to do?

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