AI porn is terrible, but hard cases make bad law
"Reforming" Section 230 is not about protecting victims. It is about greed and snobbery. Follow the money.
For three decades now, the legacy news media has hated the fact that the great unwashed masses can speak freely online. Newspapers had been publishing letters to the editor, but the space for those was limited and they always had to be approved by the editor. The legacy news media resented the fact that Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal and while they complained bitterly about the blogosphere in the 2000's, most people were never going to set up a blog.
Then came social media. Facebook, Twitter and eventually Google Plus (remember them?) allowed the great unwashed masses access to a global audience that had never existed before. Not only was the legacy media no longer gatekeepers of information, but they were losing advertisement revenue to the social media platforms. Never lose sight of the financial angle to this controversy. The legacy media became incensed when social media (primarily Facebook) helped elect someone they considered an uneducated boorish oaf (Donald Trump) as President of these United States. This is why the legacy media has been clamoring for fact checks and even government regulation of social media.
Now the legacy media thinks it has a new tool to use to silence the great unwashed masses: Non-consensual pornography generated by artificial intelligence. This is a terrible thing when designed to humiliate and sexually degrade people, but becomes abominable when people are making AI deepfake porn involving underage girls or boys. But do not be fooled: The New York Times is not complaining that "Congress has not gotten it together to reform this law" out of concern for victims, and concern for victims is not the reason the Times is cheering the fact that "lawyers have had to file suits in state courts that try out innovative strategies to get justice for children."
Section 230 is absolutely critical for protecting free speech. If social media sites, forums, blog hosting services or newspaper comment sections could be held liable for user-generated content, they would either shut down completely or they would so harshly limit content that free and open discussion would be impossible. Startups that compete with social media giants could not hope to survive against a government determined to punish them for the speech of their users. Facebook would be fine with that, though, because they have access to high-priced lawyers that competitors do not. Only big business can afford big government.
Always remember that the primary goal of regulating social media is censorship of unpopular opinions, censoring inconvenient facts (such as with COVID-19) and restoring lost revenue to the legacy news media. The legacy media knows that Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act is a barrier to government sanctions on social media for user-generated content. The primary driving force behind the desire to "reform" section 230 and regulate social media is not civic virtue, a desire for truth, or a desire for civility. The primary driving force is and has always been greed and snobbery.
Obviously, action needs to be taken against non-consensual AI pornography. The first reform should be to recognize that pornography is not free speech. As I have said many times, the men who wrote the First Amendment would literally laugh in your face if you told them it protects hardcore porn. But we do need harsh legal sanctions against people who victimize children with non-consensual sexual images. (Real world child sex abuse material is already criminalized.) AI companies could solve this easily by voluntarily restricting their software's capability to make nude images of fully clothed people. A little bit of self-restraint by these companies now could stave off future heavy-handed government intervention.
But we need to be 100% perfectly clear about the real goal behind "reforming" Section 230. The real goal is a crackdown on free speech that is unprecedented in American history, which will also conveniently increase the profit margins for legacy news media. It is not "all or nothing." We can and should crack down on non-consensual sexual images and punish the people who traffic in those images (especially of children) while not crushing the free speech of millions of people whose only crime is posting an opinion on their Facebook page that politicians find uncomfortable or hurts their feelings.