my main gripe is simply are you a platform, a publisher or a service?
Yeah, I've reached the point where I want this shit to be settled by the courts (at least until the FCC starts actually enforcing the CDA safe harbor requirements or Congress can unfuck itself to pass a law to protect free speech more adequately).
When I say "this shit," I'm referring to the quote above. All three of the above have acted like content curators and guardians of the Moral Good(tm), but they shouldn't be. In the U.S. there are specific legal protections for online providers against criminal and civil liability stemming from the actions of their users under certain conditions. It's in the Communications Decency Act, and it's called the "safe harbor" provision.
What conditions? You can't fucking curate and everybody gets a chance to speak. The whole point of the CDA was to censor people (god dammit), but the silver lining within was that you couldn't be punished for the dumb shit your users say and do if you aren't gatekeeping what people can post.
We don't punish the telephone companies for the things people say over the telephone. Even if they're ordering a hit, or giving advice on how to commit a crime, or describing where the bodies are buried. It's ludicrous to do so, just as it's ludicrous to expect the telecoms to monitor and censor all their customers if they say naughty things. In fact, we'd be outraged if they tried. They have "common carrier" status -- they let everything go through and in return they don't get punished for the sewage.
It's supposed to be the same way for internet companies. "Platforms" are where people go to talk. They're supposedly open for all. Nobody should be banned from them except under extraordinary circumstances. Allow individuals to mute or block others they don't like? Sure. But only for themselves -- people shouldn't get to mute others completely so they can't be heard by anyone else. Bans should be rare -- spamming, and things that actually break the law (child porn, specific death threats, i.e. things the government will act on), but nothing else. In exchange for being required to allow as broad a range of topics as possible, you don't get nailed by the balls if a user misbehaves and gets the law on his ass.
The minute you start curating (a.k.a. censoring) platform content based on your delicate sensibilities ("hate speech," "racism," "sexism," "conservativism," etc.), you're a publisher, and that legal protection should be immediately revoked since you've taken it upon yourself to be responsible for everything everyone posts. If you ban someone for saying "nigger," then surely you should also ban people who post magnet links to TV show torrents and the fact that you didn't is evidence enough to hang you from the rafters when the copyright cartel notices the infringement.
Services (like online games with text or voice chat) should be treated just like platforms, with the proviso that access can be conditional on being a paying customer (i.e. maintaining a subscription for World of Warcraft or Xbox Live) and banning users is acceptable for legitimate service-disrupting activities. But the latter needs careful control: banning someone for DDoS'ing the service or hacking into other accounts is acceptable, but banning someone for shouting "nigger" on voice chat isn't. That's what the mute/block button is for. Everyone has one, so everyone gets to go press it themselves.
Right now there's not much real distinction between "platform," "publisher" and "service." They all curate and ban at will for arbitrary reasons. If the damned FCC or FTC would get off their asses and start actually
enforcing the requirements of the CDA's safe harbor provisions, we'd be in better shape. There'd be more focus on teaching users how to sanitize their own feeds and far less focus on banning the undesirables. There'd be a lot more whining too (at least temporarily) from the idiots who love their deplatforming trick, but that salt is always tasty.
I don't really know what Congress could actually do to protect citizens' freedom of speech on these privately-owned "public squares." Not with the "innovation" the U.S. came up with that decided "corporations are people too." It seems like the safe harbor stuff gets about as close as you can to mandating full access for all without running afoul of a corporation's "right" to choose who to do business with and who to refuse. Otherwise you start running into the "bake the cake, bigot!" situation which reminded us that yes, businesses
should be able to refuse service in certain circumstances.
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