but prior to 230, I could sue a site for distributing defamatory material.
Congress removes my right or my ability to do so. It gives my rights away to the site who it provides 230 immunity to.
Sites and society may have benefited from this trade, but individual have lost fundamental abilities to seek their day in court and have gained nothing.
I think Congress should temper 230 by saying that if a company accepts 230 immunity from lawsuits, it needs to provide basic due process rights to appeals processes to users.
If it doesn't want to provide reasonable appeals processes, it forfeits its 230 immunities and can seek redress in court.
How would a "due process" proposal even work? Do we have the US government step in and set global rules determining what is and isn't legitimate speech and who should have posting rights on your website? And if so, how is this making the Internet more free?
I.e. if user A makes a post that defames you, you complain, it gets taken down, user A makes an appeal according to the new "230+ process" and gets it restored - then you'd have no redress in court because the provider followed the due process. (in any case, due process would be about the process of evaluating whether the post meets some editorial criteria, but the criteria themselves can be absolutely arbitrarily set by the platform; if they decide to ban the posts which contain the letter "a", that's compatible with due process, as long as they look in the appeal and point out that yup, there was an "a" in it so the ban was appropriate; and if they decide to ban only posts which they're absolutely required by other laws and leave everything else, that still fits due process).
In the opposite scenario, user A makes a post that might defame you but it gets immediately taken down by an automated algorithm; user A complains but gets auto-rejected without due process - so then you'd have a right to redress in court, but for what? The post got taken down.
And if you had in mind right to redress in court for the person making the post, they don't have any valid claim pre-230, during 230 and in your proposed scenario either way.