I also have "this is why we can't have nice things" response, but flipped around: the grossly negligent, even outright abusive behavior by a few companies are

I also have "this is why we can't have nice things" response, but flipped around: the grossly negligent, even outright abusive behavior by a few companies are going to cost us S230. This sucks all the more because google's legal power means they hardly need S230 while smaller sites such as HN or Wikipedia, for example, are much more in need of it. (and at the same time these other sites are much better at not being embarrassingly bad at moderation) The best situation I think is where there is robust protection in the law to prevent the huge waste of litigation, while at the same time sites work diligently to remove unambiguously illegitimate material and at least behave compassionately about whatever slips through the cracks. But that's not what youtube has done, they've hardly even taken basic measures. E.g. take down obvious scam content when mass reported, block reuploads of bit-identical copies (Or matches with the same perceptual hashes they use for copyright takedowns as part of their covenant not to sue agreements with studios and record labels which they use to rob artists), block varrious low false positive scam identifying keywords associated with the scam, remove the validation flag when an account changes names. etc. Having missed things like this the first time around might be excusable, but to refuse to take measures like this after years of abuse while throwing up a hard S230 wall to seemingly justify continuing to distribute the scams. It's outrageous, it's offensive, and it will ultimately deprive us all of S230 protection. > all else would be "literally give it to just heads of state", Twitter had some "government official" badge which they happily gave to a bunch of crypto grifters after they just invented a fake country.