I tend to think Ben Thompson has a good way of delineating who should be moderating the internet... that's discussed here (I think the day before he had an excellent interview with the cloud flare CEO)
These platforms (fb, YouTube, Twitter) are not fundamental service providers
As you move down the stack to fundamental infrastructure, you want them to be more constrained in how they censor.
Ultimately, we also need to figure out how to make policy decisions wrt censorship (at all levels of the stack) so that there isn't a single person at a tech company pushing a button. That's a lot of work and needs to be done carefully, but we do need to genuinely consider at what point something is damaging enough that we forbid it.
We had this debate 250 years ago and decided that society is better off with free expression than with someone deciding what speach is and is not OK. It seems to have worked out pretty damn well so far. If we are going to change course, the impetus is on the pro-censorship side to make the case for the change.
And no, it's not germane that these websites are operated by private corporations. If anything, the fact that hugely important forums where modern speach takes place are censored by parties without any form of democratic accountability adds weight to the argument against censorship in these spaces.
If we had a vibrant tech economy with new platforms arising and competing amongst eachother, it would be a different story, but when we have a stale internet landscape dominated by sprawling behemoths like Alphabet and Facebook, what happens on their platforms are issues of national importance and cannot be left to undemocratic governance and censorship.
Did people 250 years ago decide that newspapers must run articles written by anyone?
Freedom of speech means that anyone can write letters or start their own newspaper/platform, not that all other newspapers/platforms have to give part of their audience to everyone.
What myth are you reading? There are lots of things we forbid
We can decide that it's too dangerous to encourage people to commit violence, for example
We can still change laws (and have recently!) about what types of posts are acceptable. I want a world where we democratically decide that revenge porn is illegal.
But it doesn't even seem like you read my post, much less the link.
I tend to think Ben Thompson has a good way of delineating who should be moderating the internet... that's discussed here (I think the day before he had an excellent interview with the cloud flare CEO)
https://stratechery.com/2019/a-framework-for-moderation/
These platforms (fb, YouTube, Twitter) are not fundamental service providers
As you move down the stack to fundamental infrastructure, you want them to be more constrained in how they censor.
Ultimately, we also need to figure out how to make policy decisions wrt censorship (at all levels of the stack) so that there isn't a single person at a tech company pushing a button. That's a lot of work and needs to be done carefully, but we do need to genuinely consider at what point something is damaging enough that we forbid it.