How the heck do such wild, ludicrously wrong misunderstandings propagate when it's so trivial to just pull up a search engine or Wikipedia or the like and type

How the heck do such wild, ludicrously wrong misunderstandings propagate when it's so trivial to just pull up a search engine or Wikipedia or the like and type "Section 230" and see the law itself (as well as subsequent court rulings and ample discussion)? This post is nearly completely wrong. First, here is what Section 230 actually says: >Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act >No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. Note there are no requirements for "neutrality", or for perfection or any other such thing. "Section 230 gives special protection on the assumption that platforms aren't involved in selecting what users post" is completely incorrect. A service that carries anything neutrally short of a lawful order is covered under Common Carrier status, which is a different thing. Before 230, Internet services faced two choices: to be perfectly neutral and engage in no moderation and thus not be responsible under common carrier, or else to engage in moderation, fail to be 100% perfect at it, and after inevitably having something bad posted get sued for it and end up being ruled the "publisher or speaker". This would destroy all real time user content posting, and potentially user content posting in general. The point of 230 was precisely to allow imperfect and biased moderation and content enforcement by real time (or close) private platforms without assuming legal responsibility for what users published. Quite arguably more than any other law in existence it's what made the modern Internet possible.