This is a tough one, no? I thought The Verge did a great job of summarizing the current state of things:

Everything you need to know about Section 230and all of the plans for how to change it.www.theverge.com

As an owner of Flickr, SmugMug, Adventure Rider and Cake, I have personally benefited in many ways from 230 but have watched the rise of conspiracies like QAnon in horror.

What think ye?

Thanks for the link to that article.

I have mixed feelings about this. Sites are providing a platform for communications where they are not responsible for the content - and yet there is false content published that does a great deal of harm. I'd like to see harmful content flagged and potentially removed or hidden. The problem is, whose definition of harmful is used?

I'm still going around in circles in my mind, need to re-read and think some more...

> The problem is, whose definition of harmful is used?

The age old question -'Who watches the watchers'.

Repealing section 230 would allow QAnon horrors to thrive unchecked, the exact opposite of what you would like to see.

Before section 230 websites couldn't moderate ANY content posted to their website or they were open to being sued over content they "allowed" to be posted. Going back to the old way is a sure fired way to get zero moderation on websites as that is the only way the sites could avoid being sued for content posted by other parties.

Of course we know the real objective is that Trump wants to punish social media for hurting his fee fees.

Interesting. Maybe I am getting this wrong. So if 230 is revoked, web site owner can be sued for content someone posted, whereas now they cannot be?

If the former, then a lot of web sites will indeed need to moderate dramatically more restrictive, and may in fact go out of business due to such huge overhead. But we'd end up with truly curated content, sort of what book publishing used to do.

Frankly, I'd applaud disparition of the so called public speech platforms hosted for profit derived from underlying data (living by the moto: more data is better than quality data), and not caring about content per se. No one complained in the old age of radio that they weren't all allowed to grab the broadcaster's microphone, for their right to burp whatever crossed their minds. If they were interesting enough, they were invited as speakers based on merit, and that's the way public speech should be allowed to be broadcast. If on the other hand group of individuals decide to put together their own chat room, private, that should be their own concern and no one else's.

The key word here is 'public' vs. private communication., using smeone else's medium to publish one's speech does not constitute exercising of free speech. The words I am posting here are available merely thanks to the kindness of Cake.

So if 230 is revoked, web site owner can be sued for content someone posted, whereas now they cannot be?

Before section 230 websites were treated like publishers if they moderated the content on their site and so could be sued, for example, over comments written on their site if they moderated comments. Section 230 changed that to this:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

If the former, then a lot of web sites will indeed need to moderate dramatically more restrictive,

What I expect would happen is the opposite, since it's impossible to moderate anything 100% in real time, I expect sites would either turn off the ability to provide content (such as comments) or they would stop moderating at all. Trump isn't mad because Twitter isn't moderating comments, he's mad because they are (specifically he's mad only because his comments are moderated since for Trump everything is about him).

Right now we get moderation (like here at Cake), exactly because Cake can't be sued for being a publisher because of it.

Seems like section 230 is a net good because it allows websites protection from being sued because a user posted something nuts and also allows those same sites the right to snuff out content they deem harmful.

I’m not sure repealing or getting rid of it would make things better because it would make it harder for more established platforms like Facebook and Twitter to censor harmful content and keep their sites safe.

Is there anything I’m missing here?

A good article written about the 60 minutes segment.

60 Minutes Episode Is Pure Misleading Moral Panic About Section 230; Blames Unrelated Issues On ItI have a browser open with about a dozen different bad and wrong takes on Section 230 that one day I may write about, but on Sunday night, 60 Minutes jumped to the head of the line with an utterly ridiculous moral panic filled with false information...www.techdirt.com

Simple... Sue the poster not the platform. The real problem lies with the bad actors. If you bury them you will never see them coming to harm you. Sunshine is the best policy. What's the old saying "Keep your friends close ...."