10 Things I Hate About Section 230: Joseph Gordon-Levitt urges rollback of Big Tech protections

WASHINGTON (CN) — The yearslong push on Capitol Hill to hold Big Tech accountable got an injection of star power on Wednesday, as actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt urged lawmakers to repeal federal liability protections for social media companies.

“These amoral companies, they just keep allowing these awful things to happen on their platforms — and they won’t do anything about it because they will always prioritize profits over the public good, even when it comes to kids,” said Gordon-Levitt.

The “500 Days of Summer” and “10 Things I Hate About You” actor joined Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin to promote the Illinois senator’s Sunset Section 230 Act, bipartisan legislation aimed at rolling back the eponymous 1996 amendment to the Communications Decency Act. The provision has for decades shielded social media companies from lawsuits related to content hosted on their platforms — which parents and advocates say unfairly protects Big Tech even as its products harm minors.

Durbin and Gordon-Levitt spoke alongside some of those parents, who slammed tech companies for hiding behind Section 230 to avoid accountability.

“Sunsetting Section 230 won’t destroy the internet, and nothing we are proposing will impact our First Amendment rights,” said Bridgette Noring, whose son Devin died by fentanyl poisoning after connecting with a drug dealer on photo messaging service Snapchat. “What it will do is end blanket immunity without responsibility for tech companies.”

Gordon-Levitt, a father himself, briefly got emotional as he related the stories he had heard from the parents of children harmed on social media and gestured to their photos.

“I just heard a couple of stories that left me trying to keep myself together,” said the actor. “These photos remind me of my kids, and the harm that was done to these kids online might have been prevented if certain Big Tech companies knew that they could be sued.”

Rolling back Section 230 has become a broadly bipartisan issue in Congress, as lawmakers grapple with their missteps in regulating the nascent internet and tech industries in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Durbin’s legislation, introduced in December, is cosponsored by South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who has been a leading voice on Capitol Hill for protecting minors online.

Graham was not present at Wednesday’s news conference, though Durbin assured reporters that he was very much on board with the bill he’d cosponsored. The South Carolina senator is a close ally of President Donald Trump, who has deep ties with Big Tech.

Asked by reporters whether Graham would attempt to bend the president’s ear on repealing Section 230, Durbin demurred. “I haven’t been on Air Force One or on the golf course with them,” the Senate minority whip quipped.

Durbin said during his remarks that rolling back liability protection for tech companies would help to force “real accountability” in the industry but acknowledged that lawmakers would face a serious challenge from the tech lobby in Washington. He pointed to the ill-fated Kids Online Safety Act, a bill aimed at hiking oversight on social media platforms, which passed the Senate but died in the House.

“Something needs to change,” said the Illinois senator. “Big Tech needs to be incentivized to protect kids online, and if they don’t, they should be held civilly liable.”

Though his cosponsor was absent from Wednesday’s conference, Durbin was not the only lawmaker present. He and Gordon-Levitt were also joined by Richard Gephardt, the former Missouri congressman who served as House minority leader when Section 230 was passed.

In a remarkable moment, Gephardt expressed regret for his role in passing the provision, saying he hoped Congress would “correct the action” he and his colleagues made decades ago.

“As minority leader in the House in 1996, I voted for it because social media platforms told us that without protection, America would never have an internet economy,” said the former Democratic leader. “They also said the platforms were just a dumb pipe that carried content produced by others, but not them.”

Gephardt claimed lawmakers in the 1990s had not anticipated the proliferation of social media algorithms and AI-driven tools aimed at capturing the attention of social media users or exposing them to content that evoked strong emotions.

“We didn’t realize that the platforms become hate and outrage machines, which is what they have become,” he said.

As of Tuesday, it was unclear whether congressional leadership was poised to move ahead with Durbin’s legislation to sunset Section 230. The bill would likely need to pass through the Senate Judiciary Committee, where the Illinois senator serves as the top Democrat.

Asked by Courthouse News following the news conference whether he had discussed a hearing on the legislation with Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley, Durbin said he wanted to first consult with Graham. “If a hearing is what it takes to put some energy behind this issue, okay,” he added.

Durbin has for years been at the forefront of the charge to roll back Section 230. As chairman of the Judiciary Committee under then-President Joe Biden, the senator convened a landmark hearing with a panel of Big Tech executives, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, then-X CEO Linda Yaccarino and the heads of Snapchat and gaming-focused chat platform Discord.

During that contentious hearing, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley successfully goaded Zuckerberg into standing and publicly apologizing to the families of exploitation victims gathered in the audience in a poignant scene.

But despite the apparent bipartisan zeal behind reforming federal liability protections for tech companies, Congress has yet to pass any major legislation on the subject.

At Wednesday’s conference, Gordon-Levitt made an impassioned plea to lawmakers to get the ball rolling.

“I want to see this thing pass, 100 to 0,” the actor said to a round of applause. “There should be nobody — tech companies — nobody. It’s time for a change. Let’s make it happen.”

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