‘Tesla Takedown’ organizers ask Democrats to protect Section 230

By Will Oremus, Andrea Jiménez · The Washington Post (c) 2025

In early February, as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was slashing its way through federal agencies, Seattle-based organizer Evan Sutton and a friend had an idea to organize a protest at a local Tesla dealership.

“We were just looking to make some trouble and thought maybe if we set up a protest and put it on the internet, maybe other people will take up the idea and do it in other places,” Sutton said.

After seeing a post on Bluesky calling for a national day of action against Tesla on Feb. 15, Sutton signed up to make his Seattle event part of the larger “Tesla Takedown” protest, and it drew 100 demonstrators to a local dealership.

Tesla Takedown has since become an ongoing movement, with weekly protests in cities around the country organized largely online – and it’s been a thorn in Musk’s side, denting Tesla’s sales and stock price.

Now Sutton and other Tesla Takedown organizers are taking up another cause: protecting Section 230.

The famous clause in the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which includes the so-called “26 words that created the internet,” shields websites and apps from most forms of liability for what their users post.

That sweeping immunity helped give rise to social media as we know it.

But it has attracted critics on the left and right who say it allows internet giants to profit from all kinds of harmful content, over which traditional publishers would be sued.

The latest bipartisan push against Section 230 is a bill that Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) and Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) plan to reintroduce this session. The bill would “sunset” Section 230 by 2027, a move the senators say is designed to incentivize their fellow legislators to revise or replace it with a more narrowly tailored liability shield.

The nonprofit digital rights group Fight for the Future is sending a letter Thursday to Durbin and other Democratic leaders, calling on them to “leave Section 230 alone.” Dozens of Tesla Takedown organizers around the country signed it.

They argue that without Section 230’s protections, online hubs would face heightened pressure to suppress activism under the Trump administration, which has deemed some of it to be terrorism.

“Without this law to protect our online speech and communities from censorship, we would never have been able to coordinate our movement on such a scale,” says the letter, which was shared with the Tech Brief before its publication Thursday. “Instead, the social media platforms we used to share information would have deplatformed us, for fear of being sued by Elon Musk or his supporters.”

Fight for the Future’s Lia Holland said equating activism with terrorism risks chilling First Amendment-protected speech online by spooking platforms into shying away from controversial content altogether. She also pointed to a report in The Verge that Musk personally pressed Reddit CEO Steve Huffman to take down some forums in which users allegedly doxed or proposed violence against DOGE staffers.

While tech giants such as Meta have the resources to navigate a post-Section 230 world, Holland said, the potential onslaught of lawsuits would pose an existential threat to smaller sites such as Reddit, Bluesky and even Wikipedia.

A spokesperson for Durbin said he plans to forge ahead with the bill.

“A sunset, as opposed to a repeal, will force Big Tech to finally come to the table and negotiate real reform to Section 230 that can both promote a free and vibrant internet while making tech companies take user safety and the harm their platforms cause seriously,” the spokesperson told the Tech Brief. “For the sake of our nation’s kids, Senator Durbin believes that Congress must finally act.”

Graham’s office did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

An online speech expert who has called for changes to Section 230 said the activists have a point – but she still thinks the clause needs to be reworked.

“Sunsetting Section 230 as a whole would contribute to frivolous and potentially devastating litigation against social media platforms,” said Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at George Washington University. In particular, she said, removing the part of Section 230 that shields online platform from liability for the content they moderate or remove could be disastrous.

“But one of the reasons our online environment is so polluted and so manipulable is because of the super-immunity tech platforms have had for decades against liability for promoting or profiting from unlawful content,” Franks said, suggesting that some more legal vulnerability would push social media to clean up its act.