[haberman]

This is close, but misses the mark slightly I think. The cpu/disk/bandwidth to store and serve text are so small as to be irrelevant. I don't think it's a cost issue.

The issue is one of association. There are strong social forces that punish association with any distasteful speech. The association taints everything (and everyone) it touches, and the liability in the form of negative blowback can grow far beyond whatever costs were involved in actually serving the content.

Even if some set of individuals were willing to donate all the hosting costs of the distasteful speech, there would be strong social pressure for hosting platforms not to accept the money.

[jasode]

>I don't think it's a cost issue. The issue is one of association. There are strong social forces that punish association with any distasteful speech.

Yes, association is also an issue so there are at least 2 forces happening: cost and/or association.

Since I used the word "undesirable" and you used the word "distasteful", I believe we're thinking of 2 different scenarios:

(1) inconvenient/controversial content like politics or alternative COVID theories

(2) vile or obscene content like beheadings or adult porn

My perception is that the censorship topics I see getting press is more of (1) than (2) and the levers putting pressure on the money trail is the primary weapon for (1).

E.g. supporting Hong Kong protests are not category (2) vile/obscene (maybe your "distasteful"?) but nevertheless, Apple removed podcasts with that subject matter from the App Store to appease China[1].

Even with Apple's billions in its war chest, Tim Cook did not say "China can fuck off -- we're keeping the podcasts because our App Store is all about free speech!". That didn't happen because Apple wants to sell smartphones in China and so they will cooperate with China's limits on "free speech".

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jun/12/apple-rem...

[bilbo0s]

>The cpu/disk/bandwidth to store and serve text are so small as to be irrelevant.

Just wondering, in your view, if these costs are so "small", who pays them when advertisers abandon the website? Where does the money come from to cover these costs? (Small as they are.)

Full Disclosure: My own belief is that IRL these costs, especially for something at the scale of YouTube, are not likely to be terribly "small" at all. I seriously doubt most organizations could countenance such costs with no return on that investment.

[haberman]

The revenue from advertisers is supporting both controversial and non-controversial content.

If advertisers completely pull their ads off a website even though only 1% (say) of the content they were sponsoring is actually controversial, then the blowback has cost the platform 100x more than what they were paying to host the controversial content.

I think hosting costs can be significant overall, yes. But I think the marginal hosting cost of allowing controversial content is not significant.

It's only a significant cost when it impacts the revenue stream for the bulk of what the website is publishing.

[bilbo0s]

But if there is no way to remove content because of mandatory free speech, then the controversial content goes to 99%. No advertiser will pay for ads alongside a torrent of profanity and porn. It just won't happen. (Well, porn sites might? But no one else.)

Not to mention the fact that the sites could not stop advertisers from posting ads on their site in any case. (Since it would be illegal to remove content. Free speech and all that.) So why would I pay that 8 figure yearly sum to you that the big advertisers are paying today, when I can pay not even a million to a spam farm to post my ads as standard comments that you are forbidden from removing? And it's completely legal.

I just think you're being a tad idealist. Spam farms exist. Botnets exist. Pedophiles, porn stars, klansmen, all these exist. This stuff would be the majority of content, not 1% of content. Spam alone would overwhelm interesting content, and that's before you even throw in the porn, pedophilia, and klan rallies.