With a gaggle of right-leaning internet figures and conspiracists trickling out of the White House this week, pressure is mounting on an extraordinarily potent sliver of legislation that most people have never even heard of.
That law, known as Section 230, provides a legal shield for internet companies hosting user-generated content. Without it, platforms like Facebook and Twitter would be legally liable for every single piece of content they host. That's the crushing, collective legal liability of 500 million tweets sent each day. Every passing thought generated by Facebook's 2.38 billion users. Every beat of the more than one billion hours of video YouTube users watch every 24 hours.
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