> If you put up a paywall on your forum, and it is a platform for libel, you damned well should be liable
But legally, you aren't. Both Compuserve and Prodigy, the companies that Section 230 are based on, were commercial services that made money. Section 230 is a blanket protection, it doesn't have an exception built in to open liability back up in the case of lazy, insufficient moderation.
That's been upheld pretty consistently since the law was created. In particular, in 2008:
> Immunity was upheld against claims of fraud and money laundering. Google was not responsible for misleading advertising created by third parties who bought space on Google's pages. The court found the creative pleading of money laundering did not cause the case to fall into the crime exception to Section 230 immunity.
Scrolling through the case law since Section 230 was founded, you'll see that many of the cases it was used in involved commercial entities that profited from their services.
> If the moderation in place is so strict that it is producing significant false positives, why should the false negatives be protected?
Because that was the intention of the original law. The thought was that if moderation creates liability, companies won't do it. If scanning for malware makes Google liable for malware under some ruling that their moderation isn't "complete", then there's no incentive for Google to scan for malware in the Play Store. And if nobody moderated anything, the Internet would become a cesspool of malware, spam, pornography, advertisements, misinformation, hate speech, and general poor content.
Of course, some people think the Internet already is a cesspool in that regard, but my feeling is they don't have a good grasp on how much worse the problem could be.
Section 230 was created specifically to protect services who tried to moderate content, but who didn't do a perfect job, because (the thought was) imperfect moderation is better than nothing. It didn't come with a clause that said that companies would lose their protection if they were accidentally banned the wrong person, or if they had inconsistent standards, or if their standards were lazy.
> Should that be legally protected?
Legally, it is protected. Should is a separate question, and people are free to believe whatever they want. There is no shortage of Democrats and Republicans in Congress right now who are asking that same question, although the two parties seem to have radically different, incompatible ideas about what the world is going to look like when the protection goes away. And then there are a few people like Barr who mostly just care about using 230 as a proxy to attack encryption, which is at least a nonpartisan goal that the DOJ has consistently pursued across multiple presidencies.
But the point is, whatever these people's motivations, if you really think that Section 230 was a mistake, it's not impossible that you might be able to get a world without it in the future -- and then we'll all find out whether or not it was a good idea. Just expect some hefty resistance from people like me, as well as from organizations like the EFF and ACLU.