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.
You can't have user generated content without protection from litigation for the hosting service. How would something like twitter exist? They have something like 300 million tweets per day. Should they be liable for all of them, or none of them?
Should they be forced to host legal sex videos if they don't want a part of that?
I grant you that your concern is legit and my post is a shitstain.
Sorry for the insult, I did not think that through, but although perhaps you did, what about the youtube of the early 2000s? Rampant anti-semitism, 4chan-trolling, religious wars and god knows what else.
Twitter used to be something like the linkedin for the porn industry, with all sorts of really weird shit by people advertising themselves and their wares.
4chan is a more modern example of how to do it right.
Free speech on the internet is currently not a legal issue, because with current legislation, new companies are free to set up sites with libertine policies. The current problem is centralization and lazy consumers. If there is no or only a small market for sites with 2010 mores (TOS), there is not much law-makers can do about it, or should do about it.
Where do we go from here?
Personally think we're fine the way it is. If you want a site with no moderation, find one or make it.
The government should be involved only if the content is illegal.I don't think they should decide anything else. Now there could be a problem with the government deciding what's illegal, but that's another issue altogether and we could go around in circles.
As it exists now, I think there's a good balance. Child porn, death threats, straight up scams and harmful malware. That's about the only time the government gets involved right now and I don't think it should be any more than that.
Telling the owner of a site who pays the bills for a server that they can't delete a post they deem shitty because some asshole in Alaska wants to be asshole to some other asshole in Canada.... Well, to me that seems unfair. Why am I paying for content I don't want?
not my downdoots, fren
That's what I thought I was saying in my reply above, but didn't, apparently.