230 Matters: One Week Until Our Event & Discussion With Section 230's Authors

from the join-us dept

Get your tickets for Section 230 Matters before February 23rd »

A week from today on Tuesday, February 23rd at 12:30pm PST, Techdirt is hosting a fundraising event: Section 230 Matters, a celebration for 25 years of Section 230 featuring both of its authors: Chris Cox and Senator Ron Wyden.

For reasons I still don't fully understand, Section 230 remains under attack from pretty much all corners. The law that has helped enable so many amazing services is constantly being blamed for an array of problems -- most of which are totally unrelated to Section 230. It's blamed for people saying bad things online. It's blamed for targeted advertising (which makes no sense at all). It's blamed for too little moderation, and too much moderation. It's blamed for who won elections and who lost elections.

But what almost no one does is look at how it has created many amazing things, including the ability for us to build a community here at Techdirt. It's enabled tons of other communities around the globe, often connecting people who had no way to connect before. Before the internet, most communities were limited to people in your geographic region. And that's fine for a small segment of communities, but is quite limiting in many cases -- and sometimes actively problematic when your interests, identity, needs or calling are frowned upon or denied by your local community.

Section 230 has enabled millions of different communities to form around all sorts of topics and interests. And, yes, some of those communities are problematic, but so many more are actively helpful and useful. And yet, somehow, we tend to ignore all of the good that 230 has enabled and focus narrowly on the few people with ill intent.

And thus, as we hit Section 230's 25th anniversary, we felt it deserves something of a party.

Apparently, many of you have agreed. We're both happy and humbled at the response to our event (on a cool events platform that also owes its existence to things like Section 230), to the point that may run out of seats for attendees to the event before long. If you're interested in attending (or sponsoring) please consider doing so soon!

Get your tickets for Section 230 Matters before February 23rd »

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Filed Under: 230 matters, chris cox, ron wyden, section 230