I still remember the shock I felt when I was able to buy a Facebook ad aimed only at white house hunters — something the Fair Housing Act was designed to prevent — in just minutes. But even more shocking is that it took six years after my test for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, to comply with the act. As of today, the company still has not fully fixed its discriminatory ad system.

A major reason for the delay: Section 230, the notorious snippet of law embedded in the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which Meta and others have successfully used to protect themselves from a broad swath of legal claims.

The law, created when the number of websites could be counted in the thousands, was designed to protect early internet companies from libel lawsuits when their users inevitably slandered one another on online bulletin boards and chat rooms. But since then, as the technology evolved to billions of websites and services that are essential to our daily lives, courts and corporations have expanded it into an all-purpose legal shield that has acted similarly to the qualified immunity doctrine that often protects police officers from liability even for violence and killing.