Let’s dig deeper into some of the biggies. As you will see, the federal government and the social networks both have some heavy lifting to do.

 

To start, the federal government should do three things. First, the U.S. Congress should pass – and properly enforce – federal data privacy legislation. The legislation must include Purpose Limitation, the requirement that data collected for one purpose cannot be used for another.

 

It’s critical that we have a unified, national strategy regarding data protection as opposed to a patchwork approach across the states.  Although some states are trying to put regulations in place, it’s a difficult task given that the Internet spans all fifty. The hesitation to regulate is understandable but, in this case, we really don’t have a choice. The stakes are just too high. The good news is that, if we’re mindful, it’s entirely possible to strike an appropriate balance between guardrails and innovation, all while protecting self-expression and free speech.

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Second, Congress should pass legislation that modernizes campaign finance laws to account for online political advertising, expanding the regulation of TV and radio ads to internet ads. The legislation should also increase election advertising transparency by allowing the public to see who bought an online political ad, regardless of its origin.

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Third, Congress should repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.  This is harsh but necessary.

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Section 230 says: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” This essentially says that social networks bear no responsibility for what their users say on their platforms.

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Courts have already begun poking significant holes in Section 230’s liability shield. In August 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled in Anderson v. TikTok that Section 230 did not immunize TikTok from claims arising from content its algorithm affirmatively recommended to a child.

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Here’s the background: In 2021, ten-year-old Nylah Anderson’s For You feed on TikTok recommended a “Blackout Challenge” video demonstrating self-asphyxiation and daring viewers to choke themselves. Nylah attempted the challenge and accidentally hanged herself. The key here is that Nylah had not searched for the video; TikTok’s algorithm selected and recommended it to her.

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After Nylah’s mother sued TikTok, the case eventually reached the Third Circuit, which held that TikTok’s algorithmic recommendation was the company’s own “expressive activity” and therefore its own first-party speech. Because Section 230 protects platforms from being treated as the publisher or speaker of information supplied by someone else, it did not immunize TikTok from claims based on TikTok’s own recommendation. The court distinguished this situation from one in which a user finds third-party content through a search, although it stopped short of deciding whether Section 230 would necessarily protect search results.

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Then, in March 2026, a New Mexico jury went even further, finding Meta liable for 75,000 violations of the state’s consumer-protection law arising from deceptive representations about the safety of its platforms and practices that endangered children. The jury handed down $375 million in civil penalties. The court entered a final judgment in August imposing another $567 million in remedies and extensive court-supervised reforms to Facebook and Instagram, bringing Meta’s total financial liability to $942 million.

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The significance of the New Mexico case goes well beyond the enormous judgment. Meta argued that Section 230 shielded it from liability, but the court rejected that defense where the claims targeted Meta’s own conduct and product-design decisions rather than merely seeking to hold the company liable as the publisher of content created by third parties.

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…. and just weeks later, the financial stakes became dramatically larger. In August 2026, Meta agreed to a nationwide settlement with 47 states, the District of Columbia and several U.S. territories worth at least $12.2 billion – and potentially as much as $17.1 billion – to resolve allegations that it had designed Facebook and Instagram with addictive features, exposed children to serious harms, improperly collected children’s data and misrepresented the safety of its platforms. The agreement also requires significant changes to how Meta’s platforms operate for younger users.

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The multistate settlement is not another judicial ruling weakening Section 230 – Meta settled those claims rather than litigating them to a final judgment. But it underscores the same increasingly important legal distinction emerging from the TikTok and New Mexico cases: Section 230 may protect a social-media company from being held liable merely for publishing what someone else says, but that does not necessarily immunize the company for what it does – its own algorithms, product designs, business practices and representations about the safety of its products.

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This is a solid start. The idea that these social media enterprises are not publishers – that they only exist as naïve, innocent bystanders for nothing more than to provide a blank canvas for their highly responsible users to paint as they see fit – is absurd.

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Not only is Facebook a publisher, with billions of monthly active users and content published in 112 languages, it is the largest publisher of anything in the entire world. Facebook does far more than passively host material. It organizes, ranks, recommends, suppresses and distributes content to an enormous global audience, using algorithms specifically designed to determine what individual users are most likely to see and engage with.

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It’s important to remember that Congress’ original motivation to include the 230 provision was to give these companies cover to remove or restrict posts they deem “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected” – not to give them an excuse to ignore it.​ Section 230 has allowed social media firms to build hundreds of billions of dollars-worth of value largely unencumbered, shielding them from liability and enabling bad behavior. We need to put an end to it once and for all.

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It would have worked out great if, given this air-tight, blanket protection, these companies would have just done the right thing and enacted policies, processes and procedures that protected Americans and American democracy. If they had just done that, repealing Section 230 wouldn’t even be necessary. But they didn’t, and that’s no one’s fault but their own.