A look at EARN IT Act, a bipartisan bill to make firms earn Section 230 protections by meeting standards that reduce child exploitation but weaken data privacy
Backers of the EARN IT Act focus on protecting children from being exploited, but security experts say the bill actually chips away at your encrypted messages.
CNETAlfred Ng
Context & Ripple Effects
The EARN IT Act arrives three decades into Section 230's life as the baseline legal shield for online platforms, and it would convert that shield from a default into something firms must earn by meeting government-set child-safety standards. The bill follows the FOSTA template, where conditioning platform immunity on policing one harm class produced broad over-removal rather than narrow fixes.
Messaging providers face a direct choice: weaken or drop end-to-end encryption to comply with whatever standards the commission sets, or risk losing Section 230 protections and exposure to exploitation lawsuits.
Security experts and civil-liberties groups immediately contest the bill's framing — backers pitch child safety while critics document the encryption and speech costs in parallel analyses.
Second-order effects
Following the FOSTA precedent, platforms would likely over-remove lawful content to protect their immunity, since the cheapest compliance strategy is aggressive takedown rather than nuanced moderation.
The bill normalizes a second front on Section 230: the SAFE TECH Act from Democratic senators attacks the statute from a different direction, so platform liability becomes a bipartisan pressure point rather than a single-party cause.
Third-order effects
If conditional immunity holds as a model, Section 230 shifts from a baseline rule into a compliance regime that Congress can reprice per policy goal — child safety first, with the template reusable for other harm categories.
The structural risk for encryption is that legal incentives, not technical mandates, accomplish what explicit crypto legislation has not: making default end-to-end encryption commercially untenable for consumer platforms.
The trend: Section 230 is moving from an unconditional legal shield to a conditional privilege that Congress can condition on compliance demands, with the EARN IT Act's child-safety framing as the leading vehicle.
Before today's @senjudiciary EARN IT Act hearing, 2 things to read: * my blog post: https://blog.ericgoldman.org/ ... * letter from 46 academics about #Section230's benefits: https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/ ... Note to @SenFeinstein: please reconsider your sponsorship of this…
The EARN IT Act hearing going on right now in the Senate has eerie echoes of the FOSTA/SESTA debate, which the tech industry royally botched. To defeat this law, the tech giants would do well to learn from the last battle's mistakes. https://www.protocol.com/...
Today, we're hearing the Internet Association take a bit of a different tack. Its lawyer seemed to get choked up in her opening remarks, talking about the indelible mark that reviewing child sexual abuse material in her work has left on her https://www.protocol.com/...
On the eve of Senate Judiciary's hearing on the EARN IT Act, Deputy AG Jeffrey Rosen talked about DOJ's problems with Section 230. Two things jumped out at me. But first, the text of his speech: https://www.justice.gov/...
Now Blumenthal is insisting this bill has nothing to do with encryption. But as @jonathanmayer told me, if this really had nothing to do with encryption, it would be easy enough for the authors to write the bill to allay those concerns. They haven't. https://www.protocol.com/...
Inbox: Senate Judiciary schedules hearing for next Wednesday on The EARN IT Act, Graham's incoming bill targeting online child exploitation and Section 230 https://twitter.com/...
Here's @jonathanmayer, Sen. Kamala Harris's former tech advisor, on negotiating FOSTA/SESTA with tech companies in 2017: “They came into the debate really expecting to win, [...] but they didn't even have to bother with it.” https://www.protocol.com/...
Always love @issielapowsky writing and this is included. So well done—With the EARN IT Act, big tech is boxed into a corner again—thanks for including me. https://www.protocol.com/...
Not that that mattered. After she spoke, chairman Graham, one of the co-authors of the EARN IT Act, said: “I don't buy anything you just said about the tech companies in the internet ecosystem really caring. All they care about is just not getting sued.” https://www.protocol.com/…
But tech talking points stayed the same. As one former industry official put it: “We were like 'You're opening the floodgates to civil liability. You'll break the internet.' And [lawmakers] would say, ‘Yes, but what about the children?’” https://www.protocol.com/...
“Facebook is talking about end-to-end encryption which means they go blind,” Sen Graham said, later adding, “We're not going to go blind and let this abuse go forward in the name of any other freedom.” https://www.protocol.com/...
“The law enforcement community has made it clear that this law is another attempt to weaken the encryption that is the bedrock of digital security.” - https://blog.mozilla.org/... https://twitter.com/...
While few would question the importance of ensuring child safety, writes @alfredwkng, technology experts warn that the bill is really just the government's latest attempt to uproot both free speech and security protections online. https://www.cnet.com/... via @CNET
The EARN IT Act aims to protect children from being sexually exploited online, but it could also leave tech companies vulnerable to being sued for every negative review or piece of content posted, curtailing free expression. https://www.cnet.com/...
Thanks, Match, for your leadership. The EARN IT Act is a profound call to the tech community: time to step up&stop child exploitation. Online platforms cannot continue to enjoy near complete legal immunity while failing at basic obligations to protect kids.https://www.axios.com/.…
Tech companies warn that the EARN IT Act, backed by @LindseyGrahamSC and @SenBlumenthal, would hurt user privacy by limiting end-to-end encryption. Match Grp is going the other way, arguing the aim of stemming online child exploitation is worth the risks. https://www.axios.com/..…
Scooplet: Match Group becomes first tech co to support the EARN IT Act, a bipartisan anti-kid porn/exploitation bill that is being opposed by The Internet Association. https://www.axios.com/...