It would have to be a suit against individual nodes, which would certainly increase the cost (particularly for something like USENET). ... But that's a little

It would have to be a suit against individual nodes, which would certainly increase the cost (particularly for something like USENET). ... But that's a little irrelevant because those services are ghost towns relative to the past now. The more pressing reason nobody would bother to sue those channels is because nobody cares what's said there. If the loss of s230 shuttered the web services, and there were a migration back to those channels instead of just a quieter internet... Eventually a threshold would be reached that would be worth it for somebody to fire off a salvo of lawsuits against those service providers. A lot of IRC and USENET nodes are tied to institutions with enough assets that they aren't judgment-proof.