Repealing Section 230 won’t do what anyone wants
There&#x27;s almost no such thing as &quot;fair and balanced&quot; content moderation. Wu&#x27;s own bias leaks through in this article, as he lists right wing conspiracy theory but fails to recognize that mainstream news pitched a left wing conspiracy theory against Trump for the better part of 3 years: the &quot;Trump is a Russian asset and puppet&quot; theory.<p>As he states that the left wing is concerned with violence, they failed to take any responsibility for their own rhetoric which lead to riots most of last summer in many major cities.<p>As Wu says, the left thinks &quot;We have a huge problem with fascist disinformation and propaganda&quot;. But what they fail to realize is that they&#x27;ve deluded themselves into believing that garden variety conservatism is fascism, because the f word was repeated loudly and often enough by people with influence, that people started to believe it. Nevermind that a healthy democracy demands at least two healthy and functioning parties or you might as well be North Korea. Nevermind that American conservatism has never been about fascism, ever. People are abusing a term, deluding themselves of its validity, flattening other people, and using it to justify the deplatforming of half the country.<p>So much of what we see in politics today is an escalation of reaction and counter-reaction.<p>I would argue that if you are a conservative and you haven&#x27;t at least flirted with the idea of becoming more of a liberal, if not gone through that paradigm shift yourself, without losing your respect for those that hold conservative values, or vice versa, then you can&#x27;t even begin to attempt to be unbiased. Unless you can hold both paradigms in your mind without contempt of either, you can&#x27;t begin to be neutral. So few people are capable of this. I think less then 5% of the general population are, in today&#x27;s heated political arena. And you can&#x27;t expect institutions which bias their hiring towards one paradigm or the other to be neutral. If Jack Dorsey is a super liberal guy and he doesn&#x27;t have a neutral personality himself, how can you expect the culture of Twitter to be neutral? It&#x27;s far easier for Dorsey, and his Silicon Valley buddies to surround themselves with people from the Valley, or those willing to move to the Valley (who tend to co-opt themselves into the politics and worldviews of the Valley in order to fit in).<p>The reason we feel slighted by Facebook and Twitter in a way that we don&#x27;t feel towards MSNBC or Fox, is that we basically have to opt into news channels and we always have the option of opting out of cable news altogether. But tech has evolved to the point that you can&#x27;t easily navigate without touching at least one of these homogeneous, corporate, left wing monopolies. The whole idea of Section 230 was to promote the vibrant free speech discussion forums that existed in the 90s (and still do on dark corners of the world wide web today). It&#x27;s also evolved to the point that algorithmic feeds have been fine tuned to manipulate human emotions in a way that the 90s framers of the section 230 law could not foresee. Social media and tech companies can alter your perception of reality and regularly do.<p>I agree with using antitrust laws to bust up the multi trillion dollar behemoths. But I don&#x27;t think &quot;fair content moderation&quot; is a realistic goal, given how few people are even capable of it and given that much of the problem is systemic to the homogeneous monopolies themselves. Ultimately, competition will solve this in the long run, I believe. But like a forest that has grown dangerously thick, it might be time for controlled burns of these corporations to spawn a healthier digital ecosystem.