“The underlying problem of our platforms is not that they’re too conservative or too liberal” is very wrong.
There are several underlying problems.
One is that, in fact, the platforms are not run by pure profit seeking companies, but rather by companies whose staff and CEO’s and ethos is far left. That leads to an inherent bias, and an insane willingness to bow to not “public pressure” but to that of censorious far left activists.
Another is that the culture of political correctness demands that the slightest insult (except *to* the politically incorrect) be banned. That is a totalitarian impulse, and exceedingly dangerous.
A third problem is that the companies are natural monopolies due to network effect, and thus platforms that are less biased, or are biased in a different direction, cannot thrive. On top of that, these monopolies enhance their power by buying any possible competition. In Silicon Valley, venture capitalists used to want to see how profitable a venture could be. Now, all they ask is: what will Google (or Facebook) pay for it?
The best solution is to put the problem of dealing with “hate speech” on those who don’t like it. If you don’t like it, don’t read it, or block those who are offending you.
A good way to do that is to require the platforms to be content neutral — in other words, to not censor. If you don’t like that, then yes, repeal section 230. It allows those companies to censor any way they want without facing legal consequences — it gives them the best of all worlds.
Another possibility is to require those companies to provide standard interfaces, and to make their content freely available through those interfaces, to all comers. This would allow federated content providers to flourish, and would provide true diversity: if you want strong censorship of right wing talk, or of Nazi talk, or of communist talk or whatever, find a platform that does it, but without losing all of your social media connections. To force this to work, break up the big social media companies and require them to interconnect — that way, they have an interest in the the standard interfaces and federation.
The worst solution is to adopt some international standard defining what content is to be allowed, as those standards and institutions invariable suppress free speech in the name of protecting the easily offended.
