After more back-and-forth, Sen. Cruz said, “The predicate for Section 230 immunity under the CDA is that you’re a neutral public forum. Do you consider yourself a neutral public forum, or are you engaged in political speech, which is your right under the First Amendment?” It was a baffling question. Sen. Cruz seemed to be suggesting, incorrectly, that Facebook had to make a choice between enjoying protections for free speech under the First Amendment and enjoying the additional protections that Section 230 offers online platforms.
Online platforms are within their First Amendment rights to moderate their online platforms however they like,
and they’re additionally shielded by Section 230 for many types of liability for their users’ speech. It’s not one or the other. It’s both.
Indeed, one of the reasons why Congress first passed Section 230 was to enable online platforms to engage in good-faith community moderation without fear of taking on undue liability for their users’ posts. In two important early cases over Internet speech, courts allowed civil defamation claims against Prodigy but not against Compuserve; since Prodigy deleted some messages for “offensiveness” and “bad taste,” a court reasoned, it could be treated as a publisher and held liable for its users’ posts. Former Rep. Chris Cox recalls reading about the Prodigy opinion on an airplane and thinking that it was “surpassingly stupid.” That revelation led to Cox and then Rep. Ron Wyden introducing the Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment Act, which would later become Section 230.
...
There are many good reasons to be concerned about politically motivated takedowns of legitimate online speech. Around the world, the groups silenced on Facebook and other platforms are often those that are marginalized in other areas of public life too.
It’s foolish to suggest that web platforms should lose their Section 230 protections for failing to align their moderation policies to an imaginary standard of political neutrality. Trying to legislate such a “neutrality” requirement for online platforms—besides being unworkable—would be unconstitutional under the First Amendment. In practice, creating additional hoops for platforms to jump through in order to maintain their Section 230 protections would almost certainly result in fewer opportunities to share controversial opinions online, not more: under Section 230, platforms devoted to niche interests and minority views can thrive.