Re: Censorship is bad mmkay
Section 230 was largely meant to be protections for carriers. In the same way AT&T couldn't be held responsible for a phone call arranging a hit on your ex-wife, AOL can't be held responsible if BigEarl82 sends an email to Bill Clinton threatening to bone his dog. 1996 was a weird time.
1996 was also a long time ago. The spirit of the law was to allow the Internet to grow under the auspices of American free speech values, with lots of companies all competing for eyeballs and users. Unless you were doing something obviously illegal or onerously disrupting, BigEarl82 could yammer away on the evils of left-handed gingers on Usenet if he wanted to.
Where it gets dicey now is Section 230 is bumping up against past court decisions that say that public facilities cannot discriminate. You can't put a sign up at your bowling alley that bans left-handed gingers (though they are evil and probably deserve it) because you offer general access to the public; i.e. you're not a private club. Due to the nature of the modern Internet, a handful of very large, very powerful, and very wealthy corporations control large swathes of the Internet. Should these corporations be held to the same standard as the bowling alley?
I'm a bit afraid of any meddling with the existing law. Any attempt to modify it will certainly be rife with unintended consequences, and no doubt the wealthy corporate big players will beaver away at making the new law beneficial to them in some way. For example, including some kind of compliance requirement that a small player would find financially ruinous, but Google can absorb with ease. What we call "regulatory capture" in the States.
A better solution, with a long history of success, is to break up the monopolies. Monopolies are not intrinsically bad, and can in fact be pretty good (Ma Bell's laboratories did a lot of great research and development), but they put too much control in the hands of an largely unaccountable corporation. Whether Trump gets his Tweeters put on the naughty step is a sideshow to the real problem.