But it's original purpose was to remove civil liability for platforms for making an imperfect but good faith attempt to remove illegal content.
The farther we move away from the original motivating case, the less clear it is to me that Internet companies need or deserve the protection afforded to them under the auspices of section 230.
At any rate, as I doubt you'll be surprised to hear, I am also not in favor of business owners getting raided by the FBI because users uploaded illegal content. That sounds like a mechanism for crushing small websites who can't afford their own legal department, thereby protecting large websites against competition.
Politicians and citizens have the "right" to change the law.
That's how society works. If those companies don't like it, then they can pack up and move to a different country.
> So, if they demonstrate that they have no respect for the principle of freedom of speech, we have the right to call them cowardly, un-American, probably unfair in their implementation, counterproductive even assuming their goals, etc.*
They aren't just saying it sucks, people and politicians are calling for a repeal of Section 230 of the CDA in a knee jerk reaction.
They want to fundamentally shift the liability for user created content online, effectively ensuring that hosting any speech becomes a massive liability for those without billions of dollars comb through user uploads for illegal content.
As a business owner, I don't want to be raided by the FBI in the middle of the night and then go to prison because someone thought it would be funny to upload illegal content to my servers.