WARNING: Draft “No Immunity for Sex Traffickers Online Act” Bill Poses Major Threat to Section 230 (Technology Marketing Blog)

Read the full article by Eric Goldman on Technology and Marketing Blog

Plus, the door would be open for states to enact new laws that could get around Section 230. For example, imagine a state currently has, or newly enacts, an existing strict liability crime, with a bonus civil cause of action, against publication of online prostitution ads. The strict liability rule might run into First Amendment concerns, but we won’t know that until the court challenge. As we know, if there’s not a single home for them, online prostitution ads migrate into other topics. So any classified ad or message board service–even those that are completely free–would need to prescreen most/all user postings to screen out the possibly-small percentage of those postings that violate the new law. The overall cost imposition on publishers, and associated chilling effect, attributable to the law would be huge. Note that the law doesn’t limit itself to ads, so new crimes and torts could reach even non-commercial activity related to child sex trafficking (whatever that means).