Yet the analogy to tort reform cuts both ways. It’s easy to conjure up the image of ambulance chasers and shady characters who play up a bruise from slipping on the floor of a store. But there are real victims, too. A 79-year-old woman may be infamous for suing McDonalds over the temperature of her coffee, but she suffered third-degree burns on her legs and genitalia from coffee estimated to be at 190 degrees.

Over the years, C.D.A. 230 has barred lawsuits from people who have genuinely suffered. Countless women have had intimate nude photographs posted on the internet without their consent, hosted on unscrupulous websites that refuse to take them down. In New York, a man unsuccessfully sue d the dating app Grindr after his ex-boyfriend set up a fake Grindr account on his behalf to attract harassers. The widows of Americans killed overseas by the Islamic State have sued Twitter for failing to take down ISIS propaganda accounts.

A lawsuit against a tech company may not be the best way to address these tragedies, but the fact remains that these are examples of real pain and real harm. And in many of these cases, it is worth considering whether narrow legislative exceptions can protect victims at the edges. There is always the risk that a series of exceptions ends up effectively breaking C.D.A. 230, but there is still a worthwhile debate to be had.

But there can be no honest debate over a version of C.D.A. 230 that doesn’t exist. Political neutrality has never been part of C.D.A. 230, and to make it so would require a complete overhaul of the law. Senator Hawley’s bill calls for government regulation of the internet on an unprecedented scale. The Federal Communications Commission used to enforce the Fairness Doctrine on the airwaves, a policy under which broadcasters were required to air balanced opinions on controversial issues — balanced from the F.C.C.’s perspective, that is. It’s already perilous to have a government regulator decide what is fair and balanced. It makes even less sense when applied to the internet. In 1969, the Supreme Court upheld the F.C.C.’s power to enforce the Fairness Doctrine on the grounds that the airwaves are an inherently limited resource. But the sea of internet postings is boundless.

The Republican Party’s new obsession with “political neutrality” has left former allies reeling. Berin Szòka, the president of the libertarian-leaning think tank TechFreedom, said in an interview that Republicans were once his natural allies on a wide range of issues, but have now “betrayed their most fundamental principles, principles they spent decades fighting about — to keep the government out of meddling in broadcast media, fighting against the Fairness Doctrine. And now they want exactly that but on steroids for the internet.”

Of course, the Republican Party has abandoned quite a few historical norms recently. But the distortion of C.D.A. 230 doesn’t make much sense on its own merits. In a blog post, Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University Law School, criticized the Hawley bill for promoting “false equivalencies.” He wrote, “Not all political parties and viewpoints are equally legitimate. For example, I don’t think the Republican Party and the American Nazi Party are equally legitimate.” Mr. Goldman wrote that internet services should treat Republican candidates and platforms differently from those of the Nazi party — but that the bill would prevent internet services from doing so. (He added, somewhat plaintively, a request for his blog commenters to refrain from equating the Republican Party with the Nazi party).

Under President Ronald Reagan, Republicans once fought against the F.C.C. Fairness Doctrine. (Indeed, regardless of the 1969 Supreme Court ruling in its favor, the F.C.C. voluntarily abandoned the Fairness Doctrine in 198 7). In an interview, Mr. Goldman said that it was hard to find Reagan Republicans anymore.