Platforms can be neutral and once were. Algorithms can be made that are content neutral. Obviously banning users from even mentioning content from a newspaper because you don't like their perfectly legal content flies in the face of that.

That's the deal: you can be a service provider or a publisher. They want to have their cake and eat it too.

Both of those things do not exist - both the damn propaganda latter day fiction of platform cs publisher distinction - it isn't real and stop pretending it can be and the very concept of neutral platform existing in the past is laughable. Usenet anarchies? Included the sysop free to moderate however the hell they liked and the early net defacto banned commerical activity. Not neutral at all.

>Platforms can be neutral and once were

Any examples?

> Algorithms can be made that are content neutral

How so?

Where does the law say you can be either a service provider or a publisher?

There are many examples of neutral platforms that put users in the driver's seat: early Twitter and Facebook, USNET, email, RSS, WWW.

The law before Section 230 was such that if you moderated content, you were responsible for it. You can read about CompuServe and Prodigy's different approaches to moderation and liability. Congress decided that internet services should be given immunity from liability for third-party content, but it's clear their intent was not to allow two or three megacorps to act in partisan ways by blocking access to journalism. They are acting as publishers now and I would not be surprised if Section 230 is amended by congress.

WWW, RSS, email are not platforms. They're protocols/services that many platforms are built on. That's a really weird comparison to try to draw between them and Twitter/Facebook.

Let's put it another way. Bookstores are not liable for defamatory books they sell (unless they authored them). That has never been conditioned on the bookstore being "neutral"- a Marxist bookstore is treated the same as Barnes and Noble.

> it's clear their intent was not to allow two or three megacorps to act in partisan ways by blocking access to journalism

Is it clear? Have you read what the authors of Section 230 have had to say recently?

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200921/00260045345/autho...

"The first is that Section 230 does not require political neutrality. Claiming to "interpret" Section 230 to require political neutrality, or to condition its Good Samaritan protections on political neutrality, would erase the law we wrote and substitute a completely different one, with opposite effect. The second is that any governmental attempt to enforce political neutrality on websites would be hopelessly subjective, complicated, burdensome, and unworkable. The third is that any such legislation or regulation intended to override a website's moderation decisions would amount to compelling speech, in violation of the First Amendment" (pg 17)

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7213938-2020-09-17-C...

> ... it's clear their intent was not to allow two or three megacorps to act in partisan ways by blocking access to journalism

From roywiggins' post earlier[1], a direct quote from one of the authors of 230:

"The first is that Section 230 does not require political neutrality."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24923980

That is not the deal. You're trying to change the deal. There is no requirement to be one or the other.

> Platforms can be neutral and once were.

Which platform, when, and for how long?

Who said that was the deal?