[kmeisthax]

I feel like "they are a private company" is a NO U argument - after Comcast spent the better half of a decade arguing against common-carrier/Net Neutrality rules on the same basis. Right-wingers were very supportive of this argument when it protected ISPs, even though the result was more social media consolidation that ultimately harmed right-wingers.

That being said, we do need to be cautious of extending the (legal) definition of censorship out this far. You run the risk of defining censorship to include any sort of counter-speech, or making it impossible to legally moderate Internet platforms for any purpose. "Anyone who provides an Internet platform must be willing to host any and all speech whatsoever" just means nobody will want to host such forums.

Something like common-carriage for large social media platforms could work - though it won't give the right wing what they want. Most of them absolutely were violating those platforms rules, and common-carriage won't let them back on those platforms. The reason why I say common-carrier rules would be a good thing for large Internet platforms is because in practice companies like Twitter and Facebook adopted a policy of "let world leaders do what they want on our platform", up until January 2021. This is not at all a defensible policy. If you have a rule against doing something on your platform, why let people in power do it anyway?

[ufmace]

It seems like there ought to be something gated around the size and market dominance of a platform. If you want to spin up a PHPBB forum for like 1,000 people around some hobby or something, feel free to ban and censor anyone you don't like for any reason. If you're effectively a monopoly like Facebook or Twitter, congratulations on getting so big, but now any moderation decisions you make effectively controls the ability of people to express themselves in our new public square. This doesn't seem like a good practice - nobody voted for the Facebook moderation team, why do they get to decide what is and isn't okay to say?

I'm not sure exactly where the line should be drawn or exactly what the rule should be, but it seems clear that we need to do something here.