Making tech giants responsible for user content 2 published : 28 Jan 2021 at 04:00 2 Why do so many people, including both presidents Trump and Biden, keep talking about eliminating an obscure law called Section 230? The short answer is that Section 230, of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, is the legal underpinning for one of the largest and most consequential experiments in American history. Since the birth of Big Tech Media 15 years ago -- let's drop the friendly-sounding misnomer "social" media -- the American republic has become a test case. Can a nation's news and information infrastructure, the lifeblood of democracy, be dependent on digital media technologies that allow a global free speech zone of unlimited audience size and massive volumes of disinformation that can be spread with unprecedented ease?