Attorneys for the Wikimedia Foundation said even linking to another page could be an issue, depending on how the Supreme Court rules on Gonzalez v. Google.
Where does Wikipedia, the world’s most-visited repository of information on the internet, stand without guaranteed digital liability protections? It’s a question weighing heavy on the people who make up the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that administers the site containing 58 million articles in multiple languages and sees more than 16 billion visits total each month.
“Having that protection there is what has allowed Wikipedia to be written by thousands of volunteer editors around the world over the last 22 years,” said Wikimedia Foundation’s lead counsel Leighanna Mixter. “So without the protections of Section 230, that becomes a much more difficult scenario for us.”
In just a few short weeks on Feb. 21, the Supreme Court is going to hear arguments about whether Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act—also known as the “26 words that created the internet” according to journalist turned legal scholar Jeff Kosseff—should even exist. Section 230 essentially makes it so websites and platforms aren’t considered the publishers of the content users post. It has shielded companies from being liable for dangerous or libelous content as much as it’s been a boon for people holding powerful entities’ feet to the fire.
In a Zoom interview with Gizmodo, Mixter and the nonprofit’s legal director Jacob Roberts said they have run scenarios for what the site would look like without Section 230, and it wasn’t pretty. The problem for Wikipedia especially is that most editing is done by scores of volunteer editors. The mostly self-organized Wikipedia community selects certain users to sand the rough edges off articles, edit content, or even block certain users. There’s even select groups who determine the article that appears on Wikipedia’s front page.
And all those decisions could be considered content “recommendations.
