I was working at Google in 2007, and the type of filtering we had was very different from what Google does right now.

We had automated filtering of word lists that took down sites, that were hate words / porn related for protecting children.

Right now I'm paying monthly for Youtube Premium, but I see that the people I'm watching have to be extremely careful to not say a swear word by chance, or even say the name of the COVID-19 virus, because they are scared of losing their revenue stream. I don't see this as fair, because Youtube got so popular _because_ it was allowed to publish anything without being responsible for copyright violations. It would be great for them to do fact checking as long as they are politically consistent.

In EU at least we have the GDPR that limits companies from using our data however they want to, but in the US at this point they need some kind of counterbalance.

Hum, also a YouTube premium subscriber. I think I see the demonization issue as somewhat separate. It's the result of negative news driving advertisers to fear their ads will be places adjacent to content they disagree with leading to negative publicity right? YouTube's options seemed to be either create tools for ad buyers to better manage the political palatability of the content their ads were placed next to or have the big spenders abandon them.

Regardless I wasn't comment on the morality of what big tech companies were doing only the legality. Nothing in https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 suggests to me that the protections are in anyway contingent on not removing certain content and certainty nothing suggests its contingent on not publishing content yourself in different contexts.

You can't separate demonetization from the question of publishing. Traditional media uses ads revenue for compensating content creators, but at the same time has a responsability for having copyright for every content they publish. Also just by the decision of demonetizing Alphabet gets farther from being just a communications medium earning money from helping the spread of information and getting to be a decider of what those users can communicate with eachother (Joe Rogan is a great recent example).

When a new law is being created, often it is created _because_ something legal, but immoral is being done by a person/company.

Also the law you refer to is a law inside the U.S., but Alphabet earns more than 50% of revenue (and most views) outside US. It was doing illegal business in the EU multiple times on grand scale and was given fines for it.