Legally, the argument centers around Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act.
Section 230 says that
“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider” (
47 U.S.C. § 230).
The significance of this passage is that a publisher is liable for carrying libels or slanders to an audience, precisely because the publisher of book or magazine, radio broadcast, television show, movie, and so on, has both the power and the duty to study the words of the writer whose words he publishes, check them for libelous matter, and prevent them from being printed if the matter is libelous.
The man who owns the printing press is liable for what his newspaper writers write in his newspaper. The man who runs the radio station can be sued for letting the disk jockey defame someone on the air. They are publishers.
But the telephone company is not. If you hear me over the telephone slander you with ruthless and outrageous slanders, clearly false and clearly harmful to your reputation and to your business, and I accuse you of having a loathsome disease, you simply cannot sue Ma Bell. The telephone operator does not have the authority or the ability to prevent my abuse of the telephone line when I spread defamatory falsehoods.
Section 230, in effect, says that YouTube and Facebook and Spotify an d so on are like the phone company.
They cannot monitor nor ban libelous speech, but in return they cannot be sued by an injured party claiming that their platform negligently allowed a slanderer to defame him. It is a quid pro quo.
The only other option is that the tech giants are like newspaper running a personal ad page: the newspaper can be sued for defamation, but in return has the power and ability to monitor, edit or ban libel in their personals.
Now, the interesting part from a legal point of view about the collusion of the rich and powerful leftwing high-tech giants to stifle the speech of Alex Jones is that the companies have arrogated to themselves the power of the publisher to edit and control the speech of the published, but not accepted the responsibility and liability that comes with it.