Newspapers and magazines have always had a choice who or what to print in their papers. TV and radio stations have always had a choice who or what to air. Why shouldn't social media companies have the same liberties?
Removing Section 230 wouldn't have the effect people like to think it would.
Twitter, Facebook, et al just excluded leading conservative voices from the public square.
They are a private company that needs to do business to stay alive. Other companies can choose not to do business with them based on the content that's on their site. If they fail to satisfy their customers, they die.
They cannot satisfy the whims of those who pay nothing and demand a megaphone. They owe you, and your beliefs, nothing.
Maybe if you (or I) were banned from HN, no big deal, find some other corner of the Internet to shout from. FB and Twitter are the modern public fora however, they have through moats or whatever business tactics, made other fora far less significant, and in terms of discussion space they are a very big deal. You might be correctly repeating legal principles as they appear in last year's hornbook, however, the books will eventually change.
If Cloudflare and Google together delisted and deplatformed anyone repeating any words of the President or major conservative leaders -- that would undermine a core tenet of our democratic society. That would be an obvious affront to first principles. I'm not sure FB and Twitter are greatly removed from that hypothetical.
So is the premise of your argument that we should be protecting the less internet savvy from having to learn how to browse the web?
Give me a break. FB/TW shouldn't be required to uphold the public's ability to communicate.
If I build the biggest coffee shop my small town has ever seen and it becomes ridiculously popular, is it the new public square and I'm no longer allowed to kick out people for being assholes?
This "big website is popular so now we must treat it as public space" is a take that I see kicked around but has lots of holes in it.
Frankly, it makes smells like bullshit.
Media was once free and then collapse to be owned by ABC, NBC, CBS and a few dozen newspapers.
This was originally about network neutrality, but it applies to what we're seeing right now:
You can feel free to create your own too. Social media platforms existed before Twitter and Facebook, and eventually other platforms will succeed Twitter and Facebook.
Can it be expensive to start a company from scratch? Yes, it can. But that has always been the case.
But don't fool yourself into thinking my little instances have any sort of effect compared to the big mega-corps of Google/Facebook and Twitter.
As I said, there were social networks before Twitter, Facebook, and Parler, and there will be social networks afterwards.
starting a newspaper is significantly more costly and difficult than starting a social media app. You're confusing the fact that websites like Parler are so toxic that nobody wants to do business with them with the inability of actually starting it, which anyone with a laptop can do on a weekend.