I've got this idea in my head where community-minded are people who like forums, facebook groups, etc. The leadership-minded like thought leaders. This might be a pro athlete, it might be a cutting-edge researcher, it might be the president. You might be a follower of many leaders, or you might be a leader yourself (or both). On Twitter, people can gain celebrity by actual thought leadership, or just applying their "street" popularity to the online world. Or by loudly shouting the most outrageous things you can, for clicks. Think of how people try to be "influencers" on Instagram or YouTube, for the dollars or for the attention.
When I've tried to make Twitter work for me, I've worked to curate my feed with thought leaders (and a few F1 drivers). But I find that I often just don't care about what they have to say except on a very very narrow set of topics. I don't care about celebrity, and the thought leaders don't post often enough about the topic they lead on, for the signal to be worth the noise. And I'm not interested in trying to be a "leader" for leadership's sake, but then, on the rare occasion when you have something to say, your voice is unimportant, because you don't have followers.
I've always been somewhat allergic to celebrity, and I'm not saying people who find value from Twitter are celebrity-seekers, but it does feel like the mindset is orthogonal to mine, and the value I derive from social networks, I have a very hard time deriving from Twitter.
I have things to say and share as well, and the product needs to tend to that in order to have me be interested in staying on as a user.
There are other platforms where I can follow AND be heard. HN is one of them. I've shared several projects that got to the front page. Whenever I post projects to Twitter, even put a shitton of hashtags on it, and all I get is dead silence for my 50+ hours of work put into something honestly interesting, while some "influencer" gets 100K likes and 10K follows for their one-line low-effort armchair tweet bashing Elon Musk that they spend 10 seconds on. That discourages me from wasting more time logging into Twitter.
That's just my experience as a user. If they want more people like me on there, they need to fix their product to improve discoverability of small creators. If they don't, that's fine, I don't really need Twitter anyway.
Trump thinks Section 230 is hurting him, but it's actually the only thing that's been protecting him.
The 9th Circuit ruled Sec. 230 did not shield a platform from civil liability arising from their “failure to warn” a potential victim of a violent crime. Meanwhile, the 2nd Circuit found Sec. 230 did protect Facebook from civil liability for hosting terrorism-related content.
And both of those were civil cases. In the context of potential criminal liability Sec. 230 couldn’t even be raised.
That’s not social media.
Rule number one for editors and “journalists” is don’t get sued.
That’s why you see the word “alleged” all the time and “so and so claimed” rather than stating an obvious fact.
But again, this is professional media.
Even trying to do moderation at that scale just results in thousands and thousands of workers with psychological issues, from how damaging the work is.
I’ve only given evidence that businesses not privy to the Section 230 liability shield are doing exactly the same thing that you claim would be prevented by repealing Section 230, and therefore repeal will not solve the problem.
It is a fallacy to extend this to say that Section 230 is not important to protect the internet in general, as the internet is about far more than companies putting profit over public safety. The absence of the liability shield will absolutely cause other chilling effects. See my reply to a sibling reply for more detail, with evidence to support this position.[0]
It's important if you want scalable P2P platforms; the offline businesses you are talking about have pre-distribution human editorial review of all content, which effects scale and focus and permits essentially only top-down communication.
FOSTA-SESTA punched a relatively small hole in the Section 230 liability shield using the pretext that web sites facilitating sex trafficking (read: Backpage) couldn’t be prosecuted otherwise. That was a lie; Backpage was eventually successfully prosecuted using legal tools which had previously existed[0]. The thing that legislators claimed they were trying to solve—sex trafficking—remains woefully unaddressed, but the collateral damage was significant and disproportionately affected marginalised groups and small web site operators (and may have actually made the sex trafficking problem worse)[1].
Claims that Section 230 need to be repealed to “take away power from Big Tech” or to “stop extremism” are just wrong.
A blanket repeal of Section 230 will only concentrate power even more with Big Tech since they’re the only entities with enough money and power to accept liability for every shitposting troll on the web. (Again, FOSTA-SESTA already illustrated this: the big dating services continued to operate, while niche/hobbyist sites—and subsections of sites like Craigslist where dating was not their primary focus—shuttered.)
A blanket repeal of Section 230 will not stop extremism since there are multiple other non-internet sources peddling misinformation.
Section 230 is not the cause of these problems any more than paved roads are the cause of deaths from high speed car crashes. Few people would seriously argue that we should go back to driving only on dirt roads, but it feels like that’s where so many people are with this subject, and it’s really taking the focus away from why extremism exists in the first place and what we need to do to tackle that root problem.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/trump-signs-bill...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Enabling_Sex_Traffickers_...