Prior to S230 providers could be shielded from liability through common carrier status. But they couldn't enjoy that protection and remove crap. For point to

Prior to S230 providers could be shielded from liability through common carrier status. But they couldn't enjoy that protection and remove crap. For point to point services, a very hands off approach makes sense. You generally don't need to remove crap: Garbage in, Garbage out, people can ignore or locally filter what they don't want. But for public online forums a degree of moderation is required (otherwise someone can just flood it with garbage and make it useless to everyone) and generally desirable. S230 is as much about letting people moderate with immunity (both for the things their well intended efforts missed, and for harms created when their moderation goes over broad) as it is anything else. By count most of the deplorable material that shows up on platforms is not illegal or tortious. Material which is offensive, abusive, demeaning, misleading is often lawful and it often doesn't create doesn't create substantial real liability-- except in the form that without broad brush protections like S230 people can sue over whatever frivolous thing they want anf unless you're a multi-billion dollar entity you may well be bankrupt before your inevitable win. A world without powerful liability shields is one where you can't safely irritate or offend parties with significantly more money or power than you. And we can see that already platforms facebook, google, twitter, etc. are effectively immune already to civil suit by virtue of their size and wealth-- just look at the lack of effect litigation over their privacy breaches or shutting users out of their own data with no notice causing them grave harm. ... Or incidents like Apple & Google's wage fixing conspiracy, which while they were eventually convicted cost them less than they saved in wages. Their bad policies are in part because their size, wealth, and power make them significantly immune to public opinion. To the extent that the bad governance of social media sites is harmful to the public we've be better served by having more alternatives. Facebook, Twitter, etc. could survive in a world with S230, but the smaller and better curated alternatives you'd presumably like to see move over very likely couldn't. When we look at laws like the proposed what we can see is the government trying to deputize corporations to investigate and enforce the law on their behalf. One of the drivers of this is that it throughly undermines due process: The constitution established safeguards against government search but we've figured out that we lack the same safeguards against corporations (since we've "voluntarily" handed our data over to them) and so if governments coerce corporations to search they can substantially bypass our fourth amendment rights.