The law matters. Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act matters. And in the old days, for several centuries, the laws regarding libel and slander mattered, but of course at the moment they are not being aggressively pursued. Nowadays you can go on Twitter and say that Hillary Clinton runs a child sex ring out of a pizza restaurant in Washington DC, and Clinton is not allowed to bring a libel suit against Twitter because of Section 230, nor would it be fruitful for her to file thousands (or even millions) of suits against the anonymous people who post that particular rumor. And so, for all practical purposes, the normal laws regarding libel have been suspended. And yet people still need some way to defend their reputations against lies.<p>Do you want people to set up personal websites?<p>The answer is obvious: repeal Section 230.<p>Once Section 230 is gone, sites such as Twitter and Facebook will simply cease to exist. They will either shut down on their own, or they will be sued into oblivion.<p>Everyone would be forced to set up their own website, and then take full legal responsibility for what is posted to that website.<p>Once Section 230 is gone, then the normal rules of libel come back into force, as they existed for several centuries. Some extremists might regard this as censorship, but for several centuries the normal laws of libel were not regarded as censorship.<p>A civil society can only prevail where people are required to take full legal responsibility for the things they say in public spaces.<p>At the current moment, our laws regarding libel are made almost useless because the publisher of the lies are protected by Section 230, and going after each anonymous individual, when thousands or even millions of people are repeating the lie, is too burdensome for even wealthy individuals to pursue the cases. When wealthy people ask their lawyers "Can I sue?" the lawyers remind them of the Streisand effect:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect</a><p>I do not know what will happen in the future, but I am certain the current set of arrangements cannot survive. People must have some way of defending their reputations, and the traditional way of doing so has been through our laws regarding libel and slander.<p>To my mind, the most obvious way forward is to repeal Section 230. Large sites such as Twitter and Facebook would likely vanish, and people would then be forced to set up personal websites, and they would be responsible for everything said on those websites. Like newspaper publishers, they could publish many writers, if they wanted to, but they would face the normal legal burdens of libel law, just like every newspaper.