Holy crap is this a stupid backwards article. First and foremost, like so many online, IT HAS NO IDEA WHAT "FREE SPEECH" ACTUALLY IS.

>With this success came controversy. Critics of content moderation decisions came to view Section 230 liability protections as a de facto subsidy for censorious platforms to limit public speech or to be less than judicious in limiting speech

These "critics" are either ignorant or malicious or both. Free Speech is about keeping violence out of the search for truth. That's it. It's not some saccharine unicorn crap where all ideas are equally special and get a gold star, some ideas suck. But since we have no oracles it's dangerous to allow violence to solidify that in place, so instead the search is kept in the social and economic space. Saying something of course is free speech, but so necessarily is NOT saying something. Keeping things off your own soap box, not wanting to associate with people who say things you think are wrong enough, and so on are all themselves core free speech too. Those who you think are wrong and think you are wrong may put out their own soap boxes. There is no right to an audience or social approval or economic rewards, one must successfully argue and convince others for that. That's the whole point! "Censorous platforms" is pure propaganda. Moderation isn't censorship, it's free speech too.

And "platform" doesn't fucking mean anything either. Section 230 is as much about the tiniest sites as it is the largest.

>Now the internet is pushing towards decentralization that may make Section 230 and centralized content moderation moot.

No, that's completely backwards. Section 230 is a bedrock of decentralization! It's what means some rando individual or tiny startup or whatever can host something and allow anyone else to post. From comment sections in blogs to all those shiny new Mastodon services. Without it, only gigantic corporations could afford to carry the insurance and do the moderation to allow user content.

>Government agents must find and identify individuals involved with each incident.

Haha (on multiple grounds). First, the big threats are civil, not "government agents". It's anyone who feels like filing a defamation claim or whatever else. Suggesting that lots of tiny entities with zero in-house legal council or budget is hard to go after is like saying that the copyright cartels could never go after individual bittorrent users or sites back in the day, or patent trolls after tiny businesses. Ie., laughably at odds with observed actual reality. What would actually happen is what has, in fact, happened repeatedly: firms will come about that will send mass threat letters. Host some little fun forum for a niche tabletop game or ultralight planes or something? Somebody posts some comment that could maybe vaguely be construed as defamation. If your forum or channel or Mastodon or whatever is on a topic then you must be moderating which means you're not a common carrier, so without Section 230 you are liable. So you get a letter saying they'll take you to court or you can settle for a mere $2000-6000 or whatever it is (calibrated to what they think they can squeeze from you). Now what? There will be a profit incentive to develop ML systems to go hunting through whatever federated networks there are looking for anything that might be legally actionable. There will be profit motive for someone disgruntled at a given forum to call attention to anything actionable they can find. There will be a profit motive to try to post defamatory material from sock puppet accounts and then sue over it! Say goodbye to any sort of non-IRL ID verified accounts, except even that might not be good enough for small players given the stakes and how much even going to court at all costs when you have to go to discovery vs dealing with it via summary judgement at the earliest stage.

The growing drumbeat against one of the foundational parts of the net, which makes the very site here where all of us comment possible, is definitely worrying though.