There are thousands of better examples of Google etc having too much power than their eventual refusal to deal with the most famous and powerful man in the world, a man who can 100% rely on his every move being publicised in minute detail. It's a strange time for people to start caring about this stuff.
That's what I'm afraid is going to end up happening. When I was a kid, Reagan would occasionally "pre-empt" normal prime-time TV to talk about whatever the hell was on his mind. It drove me crazy: he would suddenly be on every station and there was nothing else to watch. I asked my parents why he was allowed to do that and they'd say, "TV operates on public airwaves and the government owns the public airwaves". Well, as annoying as Reagan pre-empting the Cosby Show was back then, the "public airwaves" argument was used to justify a whole heck of a lot of worse government overreach that I really, really don't want to see come to the internet.
No one claims section 230 protections. It applies to everyone and every service on the internet in the US.
You can't "lose" those protections, they're just the law.
And that law states (paraphrasing): You can't sue me for something a third person says.
That's essentially it. You can't "qualify" for or "lose" that protection.
And it applies to you and me and HackerNews and Facebook and Twitter and your github repo and your favorite recipe site and every other web site and Mastodon instance and Discord channel and mailing list and IRC channel and porn site and anywhere else that allows more than one person to share their thoughts.
>it must have a fair and transparent process when blocking someone. And it must apply this process to everyone equally, with the possibility of an arbitrator.
That's not part of the law either. And a good thing too.
Section 230 (yes, I'm saying it again) says (paraphrasing):
You can't be sued for something another person says. Full stop. No fairness is required, no balance, no transparency, none of that.
Should the big social networking sites be regulated and reined in? Absolutely! But changing/repealing Section 230 won't do that. In fact, it would hurt everyone and the deep pocketed social media companies would be just about the only ones who could afford to fight all the lawsuits.
We need to find a different way to fix this.
Fair enough. It's an interesting thought. Personally, I think we should both think bigger and look to regulation and market-based solutions[0].
That said, I went on at some length because so many folks around here don't seem to know what the law is and make lots of ridiculous claims about it.
Consider that my PSA for the day. :)