A debate has been active in Washington for months over Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996. In essence, Section 230 protects internet companies who host comments or any user-created content from being held liable for what the users post. In the past six months, some Republicans, annoyed with the perceived political bias from media companies such as Twitter and Google, most notably, have been threatening to rescind that immunity claiming that the companies treating conservatives differently makes them ineligible for the protection.
While there is evidence that the media companies are biased against conservatives (considering the proportion of conservative content that is removed), arguing that their 230 protections should be removed is a stretch.
While Google argues that they should be protected from private lawsuits based on comments, however, it seems they believe that de-platforming other sites for user-generated comments is right and proper.
NBC News reported The Federalist to Google (side note: several stories and tweets (1, 2, 3) provide the quote "Google blocked The Federalist from its advertising platform after the NBC News Verification Unit brought the project to its attention" but that does not appear in the story...anymore.) based on some media "watchdog" group, and then reported that Google was demonetizing The Federalist. Google then clarified that it was just warning The Federalist about some comments (that have not been listed) and it had three days until "a ban goes into effect."
So, in a nutshell, Google is threatening to punish The Federalist for comments left on one of its stories, at the same time it is telling the government that it shouldn't be held responsible for comments left on their many sites.
Many tech journalists are arguing that it's not inconsistent at all, that Google is not the government and Google has a right to do this. This is missing the point of the inconsistency. Of course Google is not the government, and Google has this right. The point is that Google wants a power (punishing other companies for comments on their site) that they don't want used against them. Other claims are that Google wants protection from the government, not private parties. Private parties are free to do as they choose. But that's not correct either. Section 230 also protects Google from lawsuits from other private parties based on the comments.
Granted, they're not the exact same situations. No one is claiming that they are. If you look at the specifics and details then you can argue that these aren't the same situation. However, if you look more broadly at the underlying action "punishing other platforms for comments", then there is definitely an inconsistency. Everyone should acknowledge that there is some inconsistency here, even if there are countervailing details that reconcile them.
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