This week saw a dramatic turn in our nation’s desperate efforts to clean up the increasingly poisonous online sewers that we call social media.

First, the backstory. If you publish a newspaper or newsletter and you publish “illegal” content—encourage crimes or homicide, offer to sell drugs, promote child porn, advocate overthrowing a government—you can go to jail. If you publish things that defame or lie about persons or corporations, you can be sued into bankruptcy.

If you own a bookstore or newsstand and distribute books, magazines, and newspapers and offer for sale illegal content—child or snuff porn, stolen copyrighted material, instructions for making illegal drugs or weapons—you can also go to jail. And if you sell materials that openly defame individuals or corporations, you can be sued into bankruptcy.

In the first category, you’d be a publisher. In the second, you’d be a distributor.

But what is social media? Particularly those types of social media that use an algorithm to push user-produced content out to people who haven’t explicitly asked for it?

Twenty-eight years ago, social media sites like CompuServe and AOL were regulated as if they were publications, with the occasional secondary oversight as if they were distributors. They had an obligation to make sure that illegal or defamatory content wasn’t published on their sites, or, if it was, to remove it within a reasonable time period.

The internet back then was a relatively safe and peaceful place. I know, as I ran a large part of one of the largest social media sites that existed at the time.

But then things got weird.

Back in 1996, some geniuses in Congress thought, “Hey, let’s do away with the entire concept of the publisher or distributor having responsibility for what happens in their place.”

Seriously. Selling drugs, trading in guns and ammunition, human trafficking, planning terrorist attacks, overthrowing governments, sparking genocides, promoting open lies and naked defamation. All good. No problem.

No matter what happens on a social media site, Congress said, its owners and managers bear no responsibility whatsoever for what’s published or distributed on and from the site. None. They’re untouchable. They take the profits but never have to worry........

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