>The purpose of 230 is to allow ISPs to remove harmful/inappropriate content without facing liability

Ding ding ding. Correct.

This was and is the intent, and is clear to anyone who was alive back when the problem came up originally.

However a bunch of court cases kept moving the goalposts on what ISPs and other hosts were allowed to do as part of "removing harmful/inappropriate content". Now it does not resemble anything close to what Congress intended when 230 was created.

If you are doing a good-faith best effort to remove CP, and you accidentally take down a site that has Barney the Dinosaur on it, you should be fine. If you somehow get most of the bad guys, but miss one or two, you should also be fine. That is 230 in a nutshell.

The idea that they can use it to increase engagement is absolutely ludicrous. As /u/Brief_Profession_148 said, they have it both ways now. They can be as outspoken through their algorithms as they like, but get to be protected as if it is a neutral platform.

It's time to take 230 back to the roots, and make it clear that if you use algorithms for business purposes (marketing, sales, engagement, whatever), you are not protected by 230. You are only protected if you are making good faith efforts to remove illegal and inappropriate content. And "inappropriate" needs to be clearly enumerated so that the old trick of taking something away with the reason "for reasons we won't tell you in detail" does not work anymore.

Why any of this is controversial is beyond me.