If they would just repeal section 230 already, then the plug would be pulled from all these companies and China would no longer have any influence over what is said on the internet.
What we are in is a sort of techno-mercantilism where governments enlist large companies to deliver geopolitical influence in exchange for protection.
The whole debate over free speech online is only happening because 1) content is passing through a bottleneck of only a few companies and 2) those few companies have decided to actively censor the content.
These two things could not exist simultaneously without an explicit guarantee of legal protection from the government for online publishers of user content. Without that guarantee of protection it's doubtful that any platform could have grown as large as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or Google without taking a completely hands-off approach to user content (i.e. as a "common carrier"). The threat of litigation would have forced them to pre-emptively moderate all content just like print media and television.
In the 1990s Congress decided that it's okay for the internet to operate on different legal rules from the rest of society. They decided that internet companies can make editorial choices about their content freely without being legally held responsible for those choices, and the Supreme Court upheld that decision. Online speech is now the domain of Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. and they have free reign over their virtual kingdoms without regard for any other legal system.
What we are in is a sort of techno-mercantilism where governments enlist large companies to deliver geopolitical influence in exchange for protection.