[InsomniacL]

-Devils Advocate

> I fully support the right of private companies to censor content on their premises as they see fit.

Those private companies don't have the right to censor content on their premises 'as they see fit' without giving up protections afforded to them in law as 'platforms'. The question is at what level of moderation and/or bias do they become a 'publisher', not a 'platform'.

> If they do a poor job, I can just avoid using their services.

Issues arise when the poor job spills over outside their service. As an example, The people who live around the US Capitol endangered by pipe bombs in part because of incitement organised on Twitter.

[chrisoverzero]

> Those private companies don't have the right to censor content on their premises 'as they see fit' without giving up protections afforded to them in law as 'platforms'.

Not only do they, but there’s no such thing as “protections afforded to them in law as ‘platforms’”: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

> The question is at what level of moderation and/or bias do they become a 'publisher', not a 'platform'.

This idea of “publisher vs. platform” has been entirely made up by people with no understanding of the state of the law. [1] “Bias” doesn’t play into it – they can do what they want, in good faith, on their website. Hacker News (via its moderators) has a bias against low-effort “shitposting” and posts which fan racial flames. It’s so frequent and well-known that it could become a tagline, “Hacker News: Please Don’t Do This Here”. At what level of curation of non-flamey posts does it become a publisher due to this bias?

[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-...

[nine_k]

They don't have the common carrier protections. That is, phone companies are not required to censor hate speech, and ISPs are not required to censor unlawful content that passes their pipes, because they are just, well, pipe, oblivious of the bytes they pass.

Platforms are in the business of making content available, so they are forced to control the availability, and censor unlawful content. They choose to censor any "objectionable content" along the way, without waiting for PR attacks or lawsuits. I can understand that.

(What is harder for me to understand is when these same platforms extoll the freedom of expression. I'd like them be more honest.)