> Despite their ire, most Republicans have not backed the report's proposed changes in antitrust law but instead discussed stripping social media companies of legal protections they are accorded under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The law gives companies immunity over content posted on their sites by users. Most of what I have heard Republicans focusing on has been "anti-Conservative bias" in social…
The idea is to return to the non-online liability regime where reduced (distributor, notice-based) liability for unlawful content generally requires the absence of involvement in crafting/altering/moderating content (though it does allow binary select/not-select, including with an ideological bias.) 230 allows immunity to publisher (on its face, and as applied by the courts even distributor) liability so long as its terms are met.
This probably wouldn’t help the cause Republicans nominally seek to advance with it (though it would help the cause of narrowing political engagement that they are pursuing through every other means, which suggests an alternative motivation to the public one), since while it might encourage providers to not moderate content from users while continuing to allow them to distribute material on the site, it would encourage blanket bans like the one Trump received, at a minimum, or shutting off public access entirely; its dubious that free public distribution, even with ad support, is viable online with distributor liability generally applied , and its clear it is not with publisher liability generally applied. Responding to notice of unlawful content on more than a best-effort basis (as distributor liability would require) is very hard to scale, and preemptively preventing it entirely as publisher liability would require absolutely does not scale.