Section 230 says that “interactive computer service” – can’t be treated as the publisher or speaker of third-party content. This protects websites from lawsuits if a user posts something illegal, although there are exceptions for copyright violations, sex work-related material, and violations of federal criminal law.
In 1996 Twitter (2006) and Fakebook, I mean Facebook (2004), didn’t even exist! Google was just a research project in 1996. Today, Google’s parent Alphabet, which controls much of the ad buys in America has a market cap of just under $1 Trillion. Like Amazon, it has total dominance of its market, and has more wealth than all but about 16 Countries! That is, there are only 16 countries out of nearly 200 on the planet with a GDP of more than $1 Trillion. As a point of reference, when Standard Oil was finally busted up by the anti-Trust division of the government, JD Rockefeller was worth the equivalent of about $1 Trillion.
In those days, the press was not controlled by Amazon’s Bezos, and 5 or 6 other crime families. We had cartoons that were quite effective in helping to quickly show in simple pictures, what was wrong with monopolies. My personal favorite is the one where King Rockefeller is holding up the world in one hand and a lamp in the other. Even the densest drone on twitter could understand that one. But there are others, like the octopus of Standard oil controlling all sorts of industries with its tentacles – shipping, oil, railroads, buildings, factories, etc., etc.
So, if I were a cartoonist today, I’d simply take the king Rockefeller cartoon and put Bezos or Zuckerberg’s face on the same cartoon and put Amazon or Google in the place where Standard Oil was in the octopus’ cartoon.
Bottom line is that the power of Social media and other Tech giants are monopolies that have literally bought and sold not just their competition but are more powerful than the vast majorities of countries on the planet! And they should not be immune from regulation, and in the case of Google and Amazon, it is pretty clear that they have reached some monumental monopoly status that they must be busted up the way Standard Oil was in the day of the bad old Robber Barons on the 19th and early 20th Century (by the time anti-Trust finally busted up Standard Oil, Rockefeller had left the company in 1911 – I guess better late than never – but by then there was actually some competition and Standard Oil’s stock price actually went up!). When you actually think about their power and ability to inhibit competition and now literally not just influence but determine the outcome of Democratic elections through their ability to censor their political and ideological opponents, it is even more imperative to rein these tyrants of media in.
Conservatives who have been badly damaged by the far left and globalists who control Big Tech should be more than just supportive of getting rid of Section 230 protection for these social media sites, they should set their goal to bust up these monopolies that are not just hindering free enterprise and competition, they literally have become more powerful than most governments. Why else would Twitter, this bunch of arrogant globalist anti-American puerile pissants who run a company that didn’t even exist fifteen years ago have the nerve to censor the President of the United States and think they could get away with it?