Many politicians are for revoking Section 230 aka, the Communication Decency Act. I understand why this is so appealing to politicians who don't understand the technology behind the scenes. It seems like a golden hammer to fix all tech-related problems and hold technology platforms accountable.
The reality is, without some perfect AI bot that doesn't currently exist, one that can screen all content, a potential privacy violation itself, tech and social media companies simply don't have the manpower to completely remove controversial or bad content.
Without the protections of the Communication Decency Act; Amazon, Facebook, Youtube and others would have been sued out of existence before they reached maturity.
In regards to some content, like gruesome videos, I agree, they should be removed. But it takes humans to find, report and manually do this. Imagine doing that for all of Facebook! How fast can you watch videos? Near impossible with our current methods.
Then some want to take it a step further, they want social media platforms to crack down on misinformation. Let's pretend it's possible to comb through every post posted to Facebook (I can barely get through my feed), who decides if the content is misleading? Regardless of who you get to be the judge and jury, this reeks of the potential for corruption.
This is a nail for a hammer that currently doesn't exist. Legislation that holds these companies accountable for what they can't actually do will have similar results as COPA did on YouTube. The theory is nice, but the implementation is flawed.
Under the protection of Section 230, these companies have been allowed to grow and mature to a level that they can start to invest and explore potential solutions. These big companies with the resources to tackle big problems are the only ones that can invent the hammer needed to regulate their platforms.
That said, a form of pressure needs to be applied to these companies to keep them pursuing this. I'm not sure what kind of motivation, but that's something the gov should explore and what I think they intend to do by revoking Section 230.
Sadly this won't work and will likely backfire. It will also result in many smaller companies that don't have the resources or legal teams to defend themselves and monitor their platform going out of business. Revoking Section 230 protections would be detrimental to the web and will restrict growth.
Tech companies know this is potentially coming and they're taking the one path they know they can defend; full, unaccessible encryption. Since they don't have the power or ability to enforce the content of their platforms many companies are implementing a technology called encryption that makes the content only visible to the user and those they share it with. Not even the company can view your content. You may have heard about this when the government asked Apple to unlock an iPhone. They actually can't because the phone is fully encrypted.
The government responds by requesting all companies to build in back doors into your data that they can access. Apple and many others refuse as that same door would make it easy for a bad actor to access the same info. A door for one is a door for all in the tech world.
But this doesn't stop the government from pressuring companies. This results in some companies taking an even further step. Decentralized data. They literally don't control the servers your content is on. This way, they aren't the owner of the content, and with encryption, they can't access it. By trying to force companies to do things that don't make sense or that they literally can't do, the government is accidentally creating a more dark-web like, secure internet that is near impossible to moderate.
For now, this is a problem with no good hammer.