Everything You’ve Heard About Section 230 Is Wrong

The lie was sort of funny, until it wasn’t. In the weeks after the 2020 election, as Donald Trump’s quest to remain in office met one courtroom defeat after another, his shrinking legal team concocted a baroque conspiracy theory to explain how the presidency had been stolen. At a surreal press conference in late November, Trump’s lawyers, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani—the latter dripping with mysteriously brown-tinged sweat—explained that Dominion Voting Systems was secretly linked to rival voting machine company Smartmatic, both of which, they said, had been created in Venezuela under the direction of Hugo Chávez for the purpose of systematically rigging elections. George Soros and the Clinton Foundation were possibly in on the scheme as well.