Y'all are aware that "abolishing Section 230 would break the internet" is industry propaganda, yeah?

It's used as a defense for maintaining Section 230 exactly as it is today - distracting from the possibility of, for example, amending it to more tightly constrain when a provider is protected.

In the EU, for example, we have the "mere conduit" condition - it means that you are only protected from legal liability if you pass the content through as-is, without meddling in eg. who gets to see it, or what the content itself is.

This protects genuine ISPs and other 'neutral' service providers (and in fact encourages them to remain neutral!), while it *doesn't* protect corporations like Facebook who very clearly optimize the displayed content for their own benefit (anger -> engagement -> profit).

This isn't a *perfect* solution either (under a small handful of circumstances it can discourage moderation), but as you can see from me posting this, it hasn't broken the internet, nor e-mail, nor anything else really.

Something like this is entirely possible in the US, too. But not as long as people rabidly defend Section 230 *in its current form* by repeating the (*technically* true but implicitly misleading) claim that "abolishing it would break the internet".