Correct. Section 230 is so wildly misunderstood. What it's doing is protecting the owner of a website from being liable for content users post. Without those protections, there would be no comment sections, no sites like FB/IG/Twitter or Hacker News, because absolutely no one is going to take the risk of allowing user-generated content that they are liable for.
The people who rail against Section 230 and "censorship" have it exactly backwards, if they got their way and 230 went away, instead of having specific content removed they wouldn't be able to post anything at all.
It looks like 230 was passed in ‘96, but Usenet was around for more than a decade before that… somehow, there seems to be a way to make it work? Email could still be possible. I wonder if something like AIM could work without 230.
Maybe federated social media? You’d only want to host people you actually trust, but maybe that isn’t so bad.
Edit: I think it is not that surprising that people misunderstand 230, specifically 230c2. We have:
* A constitution that prohibits restrictions by the government on free speech
* Provides “decency” restrictions on speech in some cases
* An exception for sites that act more like communication service providers, as long as they don’t editorialize, which considers the content they host not their speech
* A Good Samaritan exception for sites to do moderation, so their edits and redactions are not interpreted as editorializing
An exception to an exception to an exception is easy to misunderstand.
The people who rail against Section 230 and "censorship" have it exactly backwards, if they got their way and 230 went away, instead of having specific content removed they wouldn't be able to post anything at all.