I appreciate the well-sourced synopsis of this whirlwind saga. In a section of your post, I think you are misinterpreting the specifications of Section 230. Yo

I appreciate the well-sourced synopsis of this whirlwind saga. In a section of your post, I think you are misinterpreting the specifications of Section 230. You write: "Until now, we’ve tolerated it because these companies said they would be neutral speech platforms. They would not put their thumb on the scale in favor of one side or another, in an attempt to influence public opinion or electoral outcomes." There is nothing in Section 230 that requires online platforms to be neutral. In reality, the law was written to encourage, not discourage, online platforms to filter user-submitted content. It has no requirement for neutrality—political or otherwise. Bad actors have used Section 230 as a shield for a lot of genuinely abhorrent behavior, and a growing number of critics are calling for the law to be curtailed. Before Section 230, in the early web 90's the more effort a service made to remove objectionable content, the more likely it was to be liable for content that slipped through the cracks. If these precedents had remained the law of the land, website owners would have had a powerful incentive not to moderate their services at all. If they tried to filter out defamation, hate speech, pornography, or other objectionable content, they would have increased their legal exposure for illegal content they didn't take down. The strategy behind 230 was to give the owners of online services broad immunity for user-submitted content, whether or not they engaged in content-based filtering. If the government guaranteed sites they wouldn't get sued for their moderation decisions, most sites would voluntarily engage in filtering. Without Section 230, under common law and the First Amendment, there was emerging this distinction between publishers and platforms. Wyden and Cox (the authors of Section 230) "wanted the platforms to be able to make editorial judgments without suddenly becoming liable for everything." In his Oval Office speech last month, Donald Trump said that social media platforms get immunity "based on the theory that they are a neutral platform, not an editor with a viewpoint." That almost perfectly describes the law as it existed before 1996, "the whole point of Section 230 was to allow online services to have the discretion to block content that they deem objectionable." "There's an entire class of online interactions that didn't exist and exists only because of the legal protection." This is why Section 230 tends to be popular among advocates of free speech. "Section 230 allows sites like Facebook and Twitter—not to mention the comment section of Ars Technica & Hacker News—to publish ordinary users' thoughts without review or censorship. In a world without Section 230's protections, users might have many fewer opportunities for such unfettered self-expression". I'm still wrapping my head around this issue in terms of the bigger picture of social media's positioning in our civic society. It sounds like you are going through the same process. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/section-230-the-internet-law-politicians-love-to-hate-explained/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/section-230-the-...