On the recordFebruary 8, 2021
I rise today to introduce the Safeguarding Against Fraud, Exploitation, Threats, Extremism and Consumer Harms Act, also known as the SAFE TECH Act. I thank my colleagues, Senator Warner and Senator Klobuchar, for working with me on this important piece of legislation, which fulfills the promise of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act by forcing internet companies to finally address the serious harms their platforms cause--harms like civil rights and human rights violations, stalking and harassment, and wrongful death. Section 230--often called the law that created the internet--was passed in 1996. For some context, in 1996, Google was two years from being founded. Mark Zuckerberg was in middle school. And, the internet effectively shut down for nineteen hours when a technical glitch took American Online offline. The law was passed with a noble goal in mind: to encourage operators of then-nascent internet message boards to act as ``Good Samaritans'' and voluntarily police illegal and harmful content posted by third parties. Section 230 accomplished this goal by declaring that ``[n]o 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.'' These twenty-six words have effectively shielded internet platforms from liability for any harm caused by content posted by third parties for the past twenty-five years.…
