[happytoexplain]

Agreed. There is much to reasonably debate about where lines are drawn in regards to which private platforms are de facto public squares, if any, and which are not; and what speech is a reasonable cause for being banned from such a platform, and what speech is not. But the fact that there is such a significant amount of hateful, violence-loving speech, and that it is continuously growing, simply overshadows the topic. I'll happily debate those subtleties all day, once we're not driving cars into groups of each other over identity politics, accusing people who are trying to vote of fraud while intimidating them with guns in person, threatening each other with civil war, gleefully mocking victims of politically motivated violence, and, most of all, once we no longer have a US president who encourages all of that hatred.

[searchableguy]

This is what I wish was more studied. I feel like social media are intentionally designed to cause people to share violent and toxic speech. I hangout on discord in few big servers and I rarely encounter anything outright racist. Might just be because they are all tech related or maybe a no politics rule change the atmosphere if enforced ruthlessly.

There could also be something about speaking in public vs speaking something in semi-private real time chat app. You have time to clarify what you mean or be more empathetic. On platforms like twitter, when I check engagement metrics for replies to the tweet. I see a decrease of 10x often which is to say a lot of people never see past the first tweet a person makes and since tweets are limited by length, they encourage people to respond from their own biases rather than looking at things optimistically.

I do wonder if there is a reasonable path to punishing a platform that is responsible for encouraging content that causes toxic behavior or higher "engagement".