aceRegulating Manipulative Design Is Not Preempted by CDA 230 or the First Amendment
For over two decades, there has been a heated debate among legal scholars, activists, judges, and others about the scope of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. A persistent theme in those debates has been hyperbolic claims about the necessity of immunity from state laws for digital tech platforms and fearmongering that anything less than maximum immunity will destroy the Internet. This Article argues that states retain considerable discretion to regulate digital platforms’ design and engineering decis…
State regulators and courts retain discretion to regulate platform design and engineering decisions as content-agnostic conduct not categorically immunized by Section 230 or the First Amendment.
Personal-data-driven algorithmic targeting and other manipulative design features like infinite scrolling directly cause primary harms of manipulation, including hijacking attention, overriding user autonomy, and engineering addiction.
Evidence
- Peer-reviewedeYLS (Yale Law School)2026-07-06
How should this claim be treated?
Truvace Impact Record TRV-2026-0695, v1: “Regulating Manipulative Design Is Not Preempted by CDA 230 or the First Amendment.” Truvace, 2026-08-08. /record/TRV-2026-0695 (accessed at citation time). sha256 ff41b6892cac1708…
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