Statement: With 230 repeal bill, Dems target 2026 as year online protest organizing and reproductive healthcare info dies

A bipartisan group of lawmakers has just reintroduced a bill in the Senate and the House to sunset Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, aka the Internet’s First Amendment, by the end of 2026.

The following statement can be attributed to Lia Holland (they/she), Campaigns and Communications Director at Fight for the Future:

“It is profoundly exhausting to see that Democratic lawmakers’ Christmas present for activists, abortion patients, and the LGBTQ+ community is bald-faced betrayal. With the reintroduction of a bill to end the Internet’s first amendment, Section 230, they have aimed at the root of the free speech that allows people to organize and share information online. If this bill passes, 2026 will be the year that online protest movements die.

As 60 Tesla Takedown activists warned earlier this year in a letter: without Section 230, movement organizing will be censored. Groups like Indivisible, No Kings, 50501, or ICE out of Home Depot use social media to get out information, organize rallies, share resources, and connect with each other. If we lose Section 230, there will be a purge of all their Bluesky accounts, all their Facebook groups, and most of the other tools they use online, too.

What’s more, losing Section 230 will destroy abortion speech online, and lifesaving LGBTQ+ resources as well.

Activists have been warning for years that repealing Section 230 is a horrible idea. Without it, tech billionaires will be able to sue away any online video, protest flier, or other speech they don’t like, and tech billionaires will also proactively censor speech on their platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok so that they don’t get sued.

Democrats like to say that they are trying to sunset Section 230 as a way to rein in Big Tech, when really the loss of this law will give tech billionaires the right to silence us all.

If they really wanted to rein in Big Tech, lawmakers would pass robust federal data privacy and antitrust legislation so that people would be protected online, and have real choices beyond the billionaires’ club.”