>Section 230 was created when Twitter (and the likes) were much less important for public discourse. Section 230 (which was part of the Communications Decency

>Section 230 was created when Twitter (and the likes) were much less important for public discourse. Section 230 (which was part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, 10 years before Twitter was founded) has nothing to do with this. This is about the First Amendment. Section 230, by allowing moderation that isn't 100% perfect, certainly does encourage forums to be much more tolerant towards speech since only those who make the speech will be liable. But if Section 230 didn't exist, it wouldn't stop bans one single bit and in fact would only encourage vastly more stringent moderation and banning (assuming any unvetted user created content continued to be allowed at all on the general web). >Consider this precedent : Look, particularly with 1A SCOTUS has made many changes over the years and EXCLUSIVELY in the direction of more, not less. So if you're going to cite very old case law you really, really need to double check to what extent it's been superseded since. In this particular case the cite is in fact done for you, because if you'd actually read all the way to the bottom of the very Wikipedia[1] piece you cited you'd have noticed that it already has dealt with this: >In Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, the Supreme Court distinguished a private shopping mall from the company town in Marsh v. Alabama* and held that the mall had not been sufficiently dedicated to public use for First Amendment free speech rights to apply within it. >Recently the case has been highlighted as a potential precedent to treat online communication media like Facebook as a public space to prevent it from censoring speech. However, in Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck* the Supreme Court found that private companies only count as state actors for first amendment purposes if they exercise “powers traditionally exclusive to the state."* SCOTUS, particularly the current one, isn't going to eliminate the general 1A rights of organizations despite the authoritarian fever dreams of many. ---- 1: Incidentally, the end of 230 would mean that Wikipedia-the-organization would be directly liable for everything users contributed which would result in certain changes, the exact nature of which will be left as an exercise to the reader.