These are the 4 realistic outcomes of getting rid of section 230 protections which say: no interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher.
Option 1: every post must be vetted and manually approved by mods. For a big site, not doable.
Option 2: everyone must register with real id and they are all responsible for what they posted. Doable, and goodbye anonymity. Dictators wet dream. Welcome thought police.
Option 3: Say fuck it and close shop, get rid of all user content.
Option 4: stop doing business in the us, host all servers, all infrastructure, register everything in foreign countries.
This is what they are all begging for. Complete fucking idiocy. 230 is the only reason we can have a forum like this. It's the only reason you are allowed to post on someone else's site. Unless of course if you want to just use foreign companies servers.
As far as I remember, the proposed change was to repel 230 from the services who heavily censor user content, and that is not about spam.
Whatever.
Really that could be a step forward for internet. There are a lot of interesting and perfectly working solutions. Distributed, federative, etc. The only drawback is that there are no many users of that solutions. Everybody use that proprietary centralised crap from big corporations - Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. When someone welcome friends to the alternative solution, everybody tell "we don't want to, we have whatsapp/facebook/etc.". If this 230 repeal will be real, it will force users to drop that corporate crap in favor of open and distributed solutions.
In Russia we got that censorship with 'real ID' registration a little earlier. Do you think that this changed something? No. But now everybody in Russia know what VPN is, how to bypass censorship and how to use advaced communication technologies. The result of government laws was completely opposite to what they mean. They finally lost a possibility to censor internet or track users. Yes, there will always be some poor bastards who forgot about security and encryption and was catched by police. But overall, things become less fortune for government.
While we have internet connectivity (possibility to establish a connection from one IP to any other), there is no way to set up full censorship and tracking.
The difference is that taking out the 230 protections would impact the websites and companies themselves and they would have to fundamentally change their business.
I'm sorry, but if my webpage is not doing anything illegal, fuck any government person, in fact, fuck any person that comes up and tells me how I should run out and what's fair.
Fuck that bullshit.
We have no 230 at all. Any website treated as a property of the owner. If you do nothing illegal or anti-government, there are no any consequences. Even if you have some kind of forum/board and if some user post something illegal or anti-government on it, that does not mean that you will be prosecuted. Authorities will ask you about a data on the user who posted sedition first. May be I am not very into specific US details of websites laws, but I can't understand the real difference for something that is not a huge thing like Google or Facebook who exclusevly use user content to push their narratives.
The law right now is that the website is not responsible for anything a user posts due to section 230. People want to get the law changed because they think twitter is unfairly removing content from Trump lovers and wasn't them to be liable for removing content, essentially making big day government the boss.
And that is bad because... ?
I still don't get what is the difference between website who push some agenda with its own articles and website who do exactly same thing to push the agenda using selected user content and deleting everything that is not aligned.
Why in first case website is liable, and in second case it should not?
It's like online shop deleting any negative comment or review in feedback section. There is no difference from the writing 'positive feedback' by shop stuff.