Imagine you do everything right. Someone posts that you stole from your clients. You hire a lawyer, file within the deadline, survive the motions, and a judge rules that the posts are false and defamatory. You take the judgment to the website and ask them to remove it.
They say no. And in California, they are allowed to.
That is not a hypothetical. It is roughly what happened to a San Francisco lawyer named Dawn Hassell, and her case went all the way to the California Supreme Court. To understand why she lost the part that mattered most to her, you have to go back about thirty years.
Congress protects the websites
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act says an online service is not treated as the publisher of what its users post. It was written so early internet companies could moderate without being sued for everything they missed. Courts have read it broadly ever since. In practice, you usually cannot sue the site, the host or the search engine over what someone else wrote.
California extends it to people who repost
In Barrett v. Rosenthal, the California Supreme Court held that Section 230 also protects an individual who reposts someone else's defamatory statement online, even after being told it was false. The court pointed victims back to the original author.
A real remedy, aimed at the author
In Balboa Island Village Inn v. Lemen, the same court said that once a trial finds specific statements defamatory, a judge can order the defendant not to repeat them. That was a genuine step forward. But it binds the person who lost, not the websites holding their posts.
The website does not have to comply
In Hassell v. Bird, a trial court ordered Yelp to remove reviews it had found defamatory. The Supreme Court reversed that part. Yelp had never been a party to the case, and a plurality of the justices said Section 230 protected it. Hassell's judgment against the reviewer stood. The reviews did not have to come down.
The judgment was valid. The reviews did not have to come down.
Put those four moments together and you get the system people walk into today. Your only real target is the author. If the author is anonymous, you first have to sue someone you cannot name and ask a court to unmask them. If the author is broke, out of state, or simply ignores the order, there is often nothing more to do. And even before any of that, you have to survive an anti SLAPP motion that can leave you paying the other side's legal fees.
Most people never start. The ones who finish often learn the hardest lesson last.
Congress already solved this for one kind of harm
In May 2025 the TAKE IT DOWN Act became federal law. It requires covered platforms to remove nonconsensual intimate images, including AI generated fakes, within 48 hours of a valid request. Platforms had until May 2026 to set it up, and the Federal Trade Commission enforces it.
We think that law was right. It also proves something important: a narrow, notice based removal duty can exist alongside the First Amendment and Section 230. Yet there is nothing comparable for a statement a court has already found false. Someone targeted by a proven lie has fewer tools than someone targeted by an intimate image.
What would close the gap
We are not asking to repeal Section 230. California could not do that even if it wanted to. We are asking for three things the state can do: a fast, low cost court process that answers one question, whether a specific statement of fact is false; a ban on charging people to remove content about themselves; and a clearer, fair path for identifying anonymous attackers that still protects legitimate anonymous speech.
A ruling from that process would bind the author. Websites and search engines could choose to honor it, as many already do with court orders today, and an official ruling would be far easier for them to trust than the forged and misleading orders that circulate now. The full proposal lays out the safeguards.