>At that point the newspaper company is standing behind the story

the newspaper company is the bottleneck that the censors can easily tighten like it was say in USSR. Or like even FCC today with the media companies like in the case of Kimmel.

Social media is our best tool so far against censorship. Even with all the censorship that we do have in social media, the information still finds a way due to the sheer scale of the Internet. That wasn't the case in the old days when for example each typewritter could be identified by unique micro-details of the shape of its characters.

>Social media destroyed this process, now anyone can spread allegations at lightning speed on a massive scale without any evidence to back it up.

Why to believe anything not accompanied by evidence? The problem here is with the news consumer. We teach children to not stick fingers into electricity wall socket. If a child would still stick the fingers there, are you going to hold the electric utility company responsible?

>This has to stop. We should return to the old way, it wasn't perfect, but it worked for 100s of years.

The same can be said about modern high density of human population, transport connections and infectious decease spreading. What you suggest is to decrease the population and confine the rest preventing any travel like in the "old days" (interesting that it took Black Death some years to spread instead of days it would have taken today, yet it still did spread around all the known world). We've just saw how it works in our times (and even if you say it worked then why aren't we still doing it today?). You can't put genie back into the bottle and stop the progress.

>Repealing Section 230 will accomplish this.

Yes, good thing people didn't decided back then to charge the actual printer houses with lies present in the newspapers they printed.