THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Congress made it clear in Section 230 that these platforms can't be held liable for users' misbehavior like a newspaper or a TV network would be for their content. Now, the President is directing a regulatory agency --- one that's supposed to be independent --- to directly and blindly subvert the clearly established will of Congress, rather than working with Congress to change the law they passed.

That's not to say that repealing or reforming Section 230 would be a good idea if Congress did it. There's a very simple reason Congress decided not to treat internet platforms like TV networks. TV networks, newspapers, radio, and other traditional media have an immense amount of editorial control over their content. Even massive networks like Fox News and newspapers like the New York Times produce a microscopic amount of content compared to platforms like Twitter. 

Expecting Twitter or Google to apply the same level of control over every single one of the BILLIONS of posts, comments, videos, reviews, and images that appear on their platforms every week is not only impossible, it's dangerous. 

Many conservative proponents of repealing Section 230 claim they want to stop Facebook, Twitter, and others from engaging in biased censorship...specifically censorship against them. These "conservatives" argue that these platforms are purposefully preventing conservative users from spreading their message for political purposes without consequence. 

Their solution? Repeal Section 230 and force the Facebooks of the world to prove that they aren't engaging in political censorship to a bunch of unelected bureaucrats who will have the power to mandate what sort of speech they can allow. Of course, as Lois Lerner will confirm, unelected bureaucrats are the pinnacle of impartiality. 

So obviously, these "conservatives" don't have much of a problem with censorship per se. Instead, rather than limit private censorship, they want to expand government censorship. We've clearly seen that in their joy over the idea of banning TikTok.

Failing that, many of them have taken a page out of Elizabeth Warren's book, attacking these private businesses for being too successful and calling for them to be broken up for operating as "monopolies". 

For the record, these politicians dragged FOUR companies to Washington to yell at them for being MONO-polies. MONO, as in ONE. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Twitter all face brutal competition, from both each other and from other up-and-coming companies, in nearly every field they operate in. Facebook is hemorrhaging users to platforms like Snapchat. Google and Apple compete with each other with their own smartphone operating systems.

Most ironically, Twitter is losing countless conservative users to a new, explicitly free speech platform called Parler. So, while these "conservatives" have been busy abandoning their faith in the free market and competition to solve their problems, the free market has gone ahead and started to solve it for them anyway.

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