.jpg?w=1920&resize=1920,1075&ssl=1 "Some Democrats Are Helping the Trump Admin’s Anti-LGBTQ+ Tech Agenda")
This op-ed from Fight for the Future, a group organizing around the internet and political power, criticizes Democrats’ backing of age verification laws and attacks on Section 230 as enabling a censorious MAGA agenda.
In his first few months in office, President Donald Trump and his cronies wasted no time targeting LGBTQ+ communities with a slew of discriminatory executive orders, most of them aimed specifically at trans people. Now, with the right’s obsessive rush to blame trans people for Charlie Kirk’s death, it’s never been clearer that their goal is to completely eliminate us from public life—not just by restricting our legal rights, but by sabotaging our ability to speak, connect, organize, and find information online.
Online censorship is one of the many levers of state power right-wingers have been pulling to try and snuff out queer and trans existence, building on years of dangerous bills and state-level laws that claim to be about protecting children from Big Tech companies. But instead of fighting back, some Democrats are helping them at the controls—even as they show up at Pride marches and claim to support LGBTQ+ communities.
Top Democrats are continuing to enable Trump’s anti-LGBTQ+ tech agenda in three key ways. The first is through misguided attacks on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, known as the “First Amendment” of the Internet. Section 230 specifies that online platforms like TikTok and Instagram can’t be held legally responsible for content that their users upload. It’s what prevents tech companies from being sued by billionaires and the government when people share content they don’t like. It’s why you can post on social media about a protest, or link to information on abortion and LGBTQ+ health care, and the company that owns the platform can’t be held liable and pressured to take it down. It also protects platforms from being prosecuted under discriminatory state laws that criminalize LGBTQ+ content and other “forbidden” topics and resources.
Despite overwhelming consensus among human rights groups that this would be a terrible idea, both Trump and former president Joe Biden have supported repealing or significantly curtailing Section 230, and top Democrats like Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) have joined with Republicans in co-sponsoring a previous bill that proposed “sunsetting” the law, effectively removing it from the books. Durbin and the bill’s supporters have described this as necessary to rein in Big Tech companies that use Section 230 as a shield to avoid accountability. More recently, the day before ABC caved to Trump and suspended late-night star Jimmy Kimmel over his comments on Charlie Kirk’s death, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) described Section 230 as “a problem for our democracy” in an interview with Politico.
