Instagram just shows me all the stuff my friends post. That's it, as far as I can tell. It's great. Facebook amplifies some things and doesn't show me others. If it wants to be in that game, of distorting informational impact, it needs to take responsibility for what it's amplifying.
Unfortunately, Instagram is not just "showing you everything your friends post".
> make them responsible for promoting or curating the content, if they choose to do so
And internet should be back to BBS days where public content are moderated by volunteers in each community separately?
Now I think section 230 is not a necessity for an open internet. It just changed how internet works by making centralized business easier.
BBS operators would be equally responsible, and won't run BBSes. Same with chat rooms and IRC channels — their operators could be sued, so they won't run anything like that for public service.
Of course, a web forum could still be run over Tor, hiding the webmaster and the participants. There would be no one to sue, so whatever inflammatory content were on such a forum, it would stay unless the moderators cared.
If the point is to stifle the public discussion and push it underground, then removing the protection of operators from liability for UGC is the way to go.
I don't remember BBSs constantly got sued in the old days.
[0] https://www.eff.org/cases/steve-jackson-games-v-secret-servi...
Services doing that laborious work for no cost has let OSS authors more easily collaborate and just get work done on projects. They've also enabled small projects to just exist since the author doesn't need to even know about the infrastructure needed to host their code.
You can, and many do, self host Github equivalents. It's not like Github used all the oxygen in the room and monopolized source control.
The same is true for web fora. You can go host your own forum/fediverse site right now pretty cheaply. Domain names are cheap and TLS certs are free. There's nothing stopping you or anyone else from doing that. Plenty of people already are doing so.
Centralized platforms come into being because of network effects. You can host your own forum (or whatever) but that doesn't mean people will come join it. Lots of groups formerly served by on-topic forums moved to Facebook groups because all the participants were already there. It's no-cost vs low-cost and all of the infrastructure is managed by Someone Else. Infrastructure maintenance is a pretty thankless task.
Starting a new group on Facebook (or wherever) is pretty frictionless if all the participants are already on Facebook. There's a lot more friction starting a new little island of discussion with a forum.
By wanting to go back to the "BBS days" you're wanting network effects to not be a thing that exist. You're also somehow expecting people to have the technical chops to run a site. In the "BBS days" only a minority of a minority of people even had the modems to host or call a BBS. Just by the nature of the home computer market those people would be more technically adept than the average person.
My mom, a non-technical user, can join a Facebook group very easily. She's not going to seek out let alone join some forum even if it's dedicated to the same subject as the Facebook group. She's also not going to run her own forum to talk about some topic where she can simply and easily start a Facebook group.
People seem to forget that in the "good old days" of the early web it was mostly the technically adept building and browsing sites. In terms of conversations had or bytes transferred the vast majority was on closed platforms like AOL and CompuServe. Even in the "BBS days" (the latter era) Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL were far more popular than BBSes. Even with a BBS being "free" online services had a national reach and just far more resources available. Unless you had a big multi-line BBS in your area dialing into a board could be a crap shoot.
The olden days were not necessarily better than today despite nostalgia and fetishization. Some stuff today is not better than things in the olden days. I'm not saying I like or support Facebook or Twitter or that centralization is unalloyed good. Centralization doesn't just happen in a vacuum and for no reason. Usability is very important as well.
Of course there's more possible alternatives.
If I sue you and lose, you're out the cost of your defense. You'd have to sue me for your expenses. While an attorney might take the suit on contingency you're guaranteed to win and unlikely to recoup all of your original expenses even if you do.
Frivolous lawsuits are not in any was a boogeyman. One need look no further than bullshit DMCA takedowns and bullshit patent suits filed in East Texas to see the model for frivolous lawsuits with a Section 230 repeal.
They certainly were in the 90's and 2000's. This lawsuit[1] became a talking point against "frivolous lawsuits", and ammo in a PR war for tort reform[2] in the US.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort_reform#Frivolous_lawsuits
No small company would, but some multi-billion dollar companies might. They sure would censor the hell out of any user content, though, or else they'd run the risk of being raided in the middle of the night by the FBI if a user found it funny to upload something illegal to their servers.
Which brings us to the OP's argument, that repealing Section 230 wouldn't do what the repeal proponents want. The end result of repealing Section 230 of the CDA is that total online censorship becomes the norm, and only giant companies would be able to benefit from the limited user-generated content that's allowed to exist after the repeal.
Websites/forums exist in countries without an s230 equivalent.
That has nothing to do with section 230. Websites weren't responsible for user-generated content before section 230 and they still wouldn't be if it went away.
What section 230 does is extend the same immunity that content-blind hosts have always had to hosts that modify the content they get from users.
This comment upthread:
> If a user writes some content that stays as a comment somewhere and it is defamatory, then the user is responsible. So far, so good. This is what 230 used to address.
is wrong. Section 230 didn't address that case; the user was always the responsible party. To see section 230 at work, you need a more complicated setup:
1. User A posts defamatory content to a web forum.
2. User B posts defamatory content to the same forum.
3. The forum operators see User B's post, are outraged, and take it down.
This is where section 230 makes a difference. It says that, even though the forum takes control of user-generated content for the purpose of expressing its own views, it still isn't liable for content that it hasn't directly touched. In the absence of section 230, the forum would bear liability for user A's defamatory post as soon as they took down user B's post.
There's no problem hosting user-generated content without section 230. You only have a problem if you editorialize on top of that content.