What bearing does that have on situations like most of these, in which the crowd was already violent, destroying and looting?

It's pretty damned hard to "escalate" something that has already gone over the edge.

Not even close. I've been an editor myself.

I'll repeat myself one last time: the point I was making was not about editing. I certainly don't deny that they do that too.

I don't know, but as someone who worked on the project that later became Ancestry DNA, I can say that OP has no idea what it is or how it works.

No.

As far as any sort of actual general intelligence goes, nowhere near as generally intelligent as an actual cockroach.

To perhaps clarify this for some people:

Section 230 states that it exists to protect services that:

Twitter has not been doing those things. It has been promoting a one-sided political view, and stifling opportunities for discourse and intellectual activity.

So while I fully understand that they have a right to do that, if they want, the point I have been trying to make is that they do not have a right to do that, and at the same time expect immunity from lawsuits or prosecution from Section 230.

Their additions to President Trump's tweet(s) were not what I was talking about.

Rather, I was referring to the day-to-day control Twitter exerts over what content they allow, and more to the point, what content they have not allowed.

What I wrote above was not about editing or editorializing.

It was about controlling what content users are allowed to post, and are allowed to see.

Controlling what content is allowed to exist on Twitter. Not editing it.

That is a different animal from editing, or editorializing. Editing might be closest to it, but that's still not quite the same.

And no, courts have not "clarified" it, but there is legal precedent saying that there is a line they can step over.

And considering the extremes Twitter has gone to, in order to controlling content in a slanted manner, I am pretty darned confident they have stepped over that line more than once.

Apparently some people in government think so, too.

230 is what gives sites immunity from prosecution for things their users say.

Read again.

Losing immunity under 230 is HUGE .

It means twitter could be held liable for what users tweet.

Thing about that for a minute.

You missed the whole point. There is a word for that: "Whoooooosh!"

It isn't "fact-checking," per se, that is the issue here.

Though to be honest, that isn't really what they were doing, anyway.

Okay, but that's a technicality.

Twitter has almost never "editorialized", barring a few announcements from @jack.

Instead what it has been doing has been controlling, sometimes in very sneaky ways (see "shadowbanning") what content its users can post, or that other people can see.

That is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about. Not editorials.

If you knew much about me, you'd know how much I hate government regulation in general.

Though of course there are exceptions like Flint, Michigan, public utilities regulated mostly by their own local governments have worked pretty well.

Community-based last-mile ISP services are among the things that have worked. I'd even rather spend a little more on one of those than sending even more money to one of the ever-expanding cable monopolies.

It actually makes very good sense to do this from a "fair and balanced" point of view.

"Section 230" is what gives forum hosting providers like Twitter immunity from prosecution from, say, libel suits, as long as what they publish is solely user-supplied content.

But Twitter has been doing an awful lot of "selective" removal of certain points of view in recent months.

Which suggests they want to waive their immunity under 230. Or at least don't care enough about it to be careful.

There is already some old (by now) case law which says that if a provider controls what content it publishes, i.e. decides what content can and cannot be posted, they then assume liability for that content, and at the same time jeopardize their immunity under Section 230.

The reasoning for that is very simple: if the provider is deciding what the content can be, then they are really publishing their own opinions, and not just raw user-provided content anymore.

If Twitter wants to take political sides, as it demonstrably has, and regardless of what side it takes, it's going to end up without 230 protection.

And just watch the lawsuits start to roll in.

This is a joke, right???