American case law goes back to the Compuserve and Prodigy cases. Compuserve exercised no editorial control and was determined by courts to be a service provider, not a publisher, and wasn't liable. Prodigy moderated its forums, and the courts held that moderating (rather than just pulling down illegal content) was publishing.
Congress wanted to ban porn, but didn't want the cooperating sites to be open to being sued for publishing, so they came up with Sec 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The porn ban got thrown out by courts for violating free speech, but Sec 230 remained. If you read the actual section, you will see that it was intended to shield forums that moderated out porn, but (((big tech))) drove a truck through the "otherwise objectionable" phrase.
(2)Civil liability
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B)any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).
(Note: para (B) is just about porn blockers, not websites.)
(post is archived)