My limited understanding is that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which is apparently one of the most important laws for this topic), passed in 1996, provides very broad protections to web platforms:
1) They can't be held liable for user-generated content, e.g. Facebook can't be sued for a defamatory statement that I make in a post on their platform.
A newspaper that authors and publishes an article making a similar defamatory statement could be held liable. I believe that Facebook could be held liable if the company itself authored and published the defamatory statement, instead of merely distributing my defamatory statement.
2) They can moderate user-generated content visible on their platform as they see fit, without trying to be "neutral" and without losing their liability protections (item 1 above).
Apparently, before this law, internet companies were worried about being held liable for what users said if they did any moderation (and some companies were sued for this).
This longer video (33 mins) from Legal Eagle is nice as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUWIi-Ppe5k. It's been a few weeks since I watched it so hopefully I didn't miss too many important details.
Section 230 protection should not exist. When this was enacted, nothing like Facebook, YouTube,Twitter, etc. existed, and InfoSeek and AltaVista were the leading search engines...
1) They can't be held liable for user-generated content, e.g. Facebook can't be sued for a defamatory statement that I make in a post on their platform.
A newspaper that authors and publishes an article making a similar defamatory statement could be held liable. I believe that Facebook could be held liable if the company itself authored and published the defamatory statement, instead of merely distributing my defamatory statement.
2) They can moderate user-generated content visible on their platform as they see fit, without trying to be "neutral" and without losing their liability protections (item 1 above).
Apparently, before this law, internet companies were worried about being held liable for what users said if they did any moderation (and some companies were sued for this).
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This article seems to be a decent overview: https://www.minclaw.com/legal-resource-center/what-is-sectio...
This longer video (33 mins) from Legal Eagle is nice as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUWIi-Ppe5k. It's been a few weeks since I watched it so hopefully I didn't miss too many important details.