The point in your old lady's chain of actions where a law was and should be considered broken was when the malware ads were injected, not before. You can't go that far up the chain, there are too many proxies, too many people with intents that are not obviously malicious. People should be given the benefit of the doubt in most cases.
In addition, in your profit explanation that you linked to you stated that if the service can't scale up human interactions to match with complaints then that service shouldn't exist. That's laughable. To do so would make service owners so vulnerable to automated complaints that legitimate ones would never make it through, that goes for up and down the business scale. What your proposal ends up doing is creating a non-anonymous internet by necessity.
(MapQuest is a popular one for malicious sites to pretend to be because most of the people searching for it are seniors... they heard about it twenty years ago and then never moved on from searching for it when they want directions somewhere.)
From that Wikipedia page, some of the current effects (again, emphasis mine):
> Craigslist ceased offering its "Personals" section within all US domains in response to the bill's passing, stating "Any tool or service can be misused. We can’t take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services." Furry personals website Pounced.org voluntarily shut down, citing increased liability under the bill, and the difficulty of monitoring all the listings on the site for a small organization.
> The effectiveness of the bill has come into question as it has purportedly endangered sex workers and has been ineffective in catching and stopping sex traffickers. The sex worker community has claimed the law doesn't directly address issues that contribute to sex trafficking, but instead has drastically limited the tools available for law enforcement to seek surviving victims of sex trade. Similar consequences of the law's enactment have been reported internationally.
> A number of policy changes enacted by the popular social networks Facebook and Tumblr (the latter having been well known for having liberal policies regarding adult content) to restrict the posting of sexual content on their respective platforms have also been cited as examples of proactive censorship in the wake of the law, and a wider pattern of increased targeted censorship towards LGBT communities.
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Now, this kind of effect doesn't get as much mainstream attention because people are primed not to think of sex censorship as "real" censorship. But again, we have examples on the book of what happens to legitimate services (both large and small) when laws like this get passed. It's not fearmongering, it's history.
People have these assumptions that laws are going to be reasonably applied -- that's not a safe assumption to make if you pay attention to the history of these laws.
I'm largely unsympathetic to those arguments for the same reason that I'm unsympathetic to all of the lawmakers saying, "well this time we regulate encryption it will be different." We have a number of examples of how this can go wrong (and has gone wrong). If somebody wants to propose that it'll be different the next time we weaken 230 or add exceptions, then I think the onus is on them to provide some kind of compelling evidence as to why it's going to be different this time.
What makes you certain that the policies you propose won't have the same effect as FOSTA/SESTA?
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As to why these laws primarily affect platforms that are already trying to moderate and not free-for-all hellholes, that's in part because of existing case law around the difference between a publisher and a distributor.
From Wikipedia's entry on Compuserve's case (once again, emphasis mine):
> The court held that "CompuServe has no more editorial control over such a publication [as Rumorville] than does a public library, book store, or newsstand, and it would be no more feasible for CompuServe to examine every publication it carries for potentially defamatory statements than it would be for any other distributor to do so."
Bills like SESTA/FOSTA have managed to pass without a lot of opposition because, again, people are primed to think that sex censorship isn't real censorship. But where more mainstream content is concerned, you should understand that proposing punishments for distributors is a pretty big change to existing libel/speech laws. Big enough that I don't even feel comfortable speculating on what the legal challenges or possible effects would be. That's a radical departure from how we currently think about speech in the US, not just on the Internet but in physical/print spaces as well.
And again, I think the examples here are missing the same concept that Section 230 fails to recognize: Profit, as I discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22816016 It seems like the author of Section 230 failed to recognize we're in a capitalist society when this regulation was drafted.
When platforms are taking a cut out of illegal activity, as Big Tech platforms do when they operate ad networks, courts would have to agree that any platform party, regardless of whether or not they currently moderate, should be held to some manner of responsibility.
Right now, when an old lady clicks a Google search result for "mapquest", clicks the top link for "Maps Quest"[0] because Google ads aren't distinguishable from real search results to the untrained eye, is pushed to install a browser extension (from the Chrome Web Store) that hijacks her browser's new tab and search, injects malicious ads, and scrapes her private info to relay to an attacker, Google makes money. And is wholly protected by Section 230 for that activity and unable to be held responsible for refusing to delist the malicious ad.
In what world is that the right legal position?
[0] (This is a very real world example, I've done a lot of senior citizen tech support, and this is how 90% of them get owned.)