Michael Hiltzik: The Supreme Court holds the internet's fate in its hands, and you should be terrified

Almost no one noticed in 1996 when Congress gave online social media platforms sweeping legal immunity from what their users posted on them.

The provision crafted by then-Rep. Christopher Cox and then-Rep. Ron Wyden was known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It has since become labeled as the "Magna Carta of the internet" and "the twenty-six words that created the internet."

Without Section 230, according to Jeff Kosseff, the law professor whose book on the section bears the latter title, the social media world as we know it today "simply could not exist."

That's why advocates of online speech — indeed, of internet communications generally — are very, very nervous that the Supreme Court has taken up a case that could determine Section 230's limits or even, in an extreme eventuality, its constitutionality.

The Supreme Court's decision to review two lower court rulings, including , marks the first time the court has chosen to review Section 230, after years in which it consistently turned away cases involving the