As I pointed out, giving special legal protections (if you believe, I think wrongly, that that's what's happening) to companies that are on the president's good side is just the flip side of taking them away if they're on his bad side. It's not a disagreement on substance here; it's just that you're comfortable with the gov't limiting speech and I'm not.
Section 230 shields Twitter from the requirement to curate content for liability.
I cant believe i have to say this, but Twitter is not a person. Twitter is a company legally safeguarded from liability so they do not have to curate the posts of 335 million+ users.
If they are choosing to curate and correct then they clearly no longer need the protection. They could be as liable for everything posted on their site as the NYT is for everything they publish.
If you can't see the danger of letting a company engaged in a medium for the free exchange of ideas that they can censor and edit those they disagree with, i don't know what to tell you.
I think you're just not seeing or acknowledging the implications of your own position. If you don't think that "Twitter" should be allowed to check facts without losing some special protection, you don't think that "some people" should be allowed to check facts. Same point, expressed in different ways.
Once again Twitter is not people....twitter is not person.
This isn't about someone being attacked by the state for something they said. This is about a specialized civil protection for social media companies.
A lot of political discourse tales place on social media. Twitter is welcome to join the discussion as a participant, but not as a platform.
If the gov't likes you, they call you a "platform" which some people oddly think confers special privileges. And if they don't like you, you're a "publisher," which means that you're responsible for the words of people you have no connection to. This is an attack on free speech.
It isnt. Tell me 1 person who had been held criminally liable for fact-checking trump.
This issue is completely centered in civil law about the boundaries between platform and publisher.
Once again if a writer for the New York Times erroneously calls you a homosexual, you can sure the writer and the publication.
However johnny456 on Twitter can state the same thing every day and you cant sure Twitter for what he says.
If there was no distinction between liability for platforms and publishers, Twitter would have been sued to extinction in under a year.
But everyone else is not on the footing that if they say something the president doesn't like, they get shut down or are held liable for something that someone else says.
Everyone else isnt enjoying the extra civil protections social media companies do.
Nobody is shutting down Twitter. I think the company is both successful and savvy enough to make the right decisions about whether it wants to be a platform or publisher.