We've had threads about it on HN, but it's also (for obvious reasons) come up recently, and here's Ken White citing a recent SCOTUS decision knocking this idea down:
https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1141766582382678016
(The whole thread is good).
But that is that Marsh v. Alabama had the company wanting to use a state law to kick people out (and this was repeated with the California case Pruneyard). "The state doesn't need to actively help you kick people exercising their 1A rights in a place you don't want them to" is very, very different from "The state can prevent you from exercising your own autonomy to prevent someone from re-accessing your property".
If the company town put up a fence and a gate, they wouldn't be forced to let anyone in.
They are playing cute with political speech. They aren't publishing in the traditional sense. But heavy curation of independent content is (at their volume) publishing - without the regulation accorded publishers. They are, by their actions, espousing certain political ideas by only allowing those ideas to exist in their 'public forum'.
For anyone, even a staunch libertarian, to claim that the government should not get in their kitchen on that basis is naive in my opinion.
What I will say is, however you hope to resolve this problem, eliminating the 230 protections is probably not the right way to go about it if you want providers like Twitter to be less intrusive, or for alternative venues to be viable at all. I think the only coherent "free speech" strategy that involves attacking 230 is accelerationism; that maybe by blowing up the US commercial Internet we'll somehow all migrate to a completely free blockchain Internet run out of the Azores or something.
Moderation doesn't scale, so I think this is a case of either do what 230 requires or cease existing as a going concern - either of these would be good outcomes, so this is a powerful lever.
Some ideas in no particular order; a platform owner is only shielded from liability inasmuch as they (choose as many as applicable):
1. Provide a forthright accounting of any negative actions taken against an account (no shadowbans, no silent editing or hiding of content from discovery) at the time the action is taken with a forthright explanation of how the conduct broke the stated rules.
2. Provide an appeals process for bans/negative actions run by a neutral third party, with any ambiguity resolved in favor of the appellant.
3. Do not make or enforce ex-post-facto rule changes
4. Demonstrate no pattern of unfair or unequal application of the stated rules
5. If a ban is issued, a "wind-down" period must be granted to allow the banned user time to move what they can of their social network somewhere else.
6. Upon request, your own account's data must be provided in full.
OR
7. Remain completely hands-off from a content removal standpoint. Content is removed if it is either literally illegal or breaks the service and under no other circumstance.
This last one would still allow for spam filtering and content categorization, which would allow the user experience to change little from today, and puts the most control in the hands of individual users.
As a matter of principle, any regulatory regime that would put HN as Dan moderates it at risk is bad, and what you're proposing would seem to threaten HN. All your bullets here seem like things that will pull providers into litigation.
Having it apply to every forum everywhere would suck and be unworkable, but once you're at Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/etc. levels of exposure, there are a different set of interests and responsibilities to society in play.
I should add a point I should have made earlier, which is that 230 is in no way based on a notion of being "publishers" or "platforms". That's a super common misconception about the law.
That ambiguity is precisely what I try to address. That distinction might not exist now, but it arguably should.
It’s also not clear to me why we’d expect a private company to have to answer to you or me or anybody else about decisions they make. We can choose to not use their services if we don’t agree with them (and many people on this site have done exactly that), but any rule that attempts to say “once you’re popular enough, your business has to follow somebody else’s rulebook for how you decide what content you must host” isn’t going to make sense to me.
Put plainly, I do not believe it is possible for a social network to moderate hard or fast enough at Facebook/Twitter scale to reject section 230 immunity. Even if they took the step of pre-moderating all content before it appears on the site, there is simply too much content coming in for that to be a realistic option (and not lose a ton of users due to the delay putting people off).
To give you an idea of the scale we're talking about, Twitter does about 500,000,000 tweets per day.
>It’s also not clear to me why we’d expect a private company to have to answer to you or me or anybody else about decisions they make.
They answer to society at the end of the day, which can express its desires via the legal system. If society tires of social networks acting as unaccountable gatekeepers to the national conversation, society can act.