[salawat]

Fine then. Here we go. I now suggest a medium by which others may pseudonymously incite each other to violence by creating accounts on various services, and hosting credentials in a regular manner such that one can compose a system using arbitrary providers to host the same type of speech.

By your logic, "Welp, there goes the internet because there are awful people." Welcome to reality. People are horrible. They have been horrible, this is not new. They will not stop being horrible. We maintain these systems in spite of them that the not horrible people may be able to achieve something they otherwise couldn't before. The problem, in my estimation, is people who are uncomfortable with other people organizing which in and of itself is the collective superpower of humanity. They would see that capability locked away, only to be approved by someone, but never taking into account that someday that ability to squelch organization may be applied to them.

I'm sorry, but no. You don't get to have your cake and eat it too. The cost of Liberty is vigilance eternal. You may cower in fear at the prospect. Not everyone does.

If someone grabs your hair in a fight, you don't chop it off so they can't do it anymore. You adapt.

[hackerlight]

  "By your logic, "Welp, there goes the internet because there are awful people.""

That's not my logic. You're assuming I'm an ideologue like the free speech purists. But I am a pragmatist that draws lines based on best guesses and cost benefit trade offs whenever one person's freedom infringes on another person's freedom.

I don't want to nuke YouTube not because it has no hate content. I don't want to nuke it because the proportion of hate content is sufficiently low such that its contribution to the world is largely positive. Pragmatism is the virtue, and ideological possession is the vice.

[dmatech]

As a society, the USA has decided that mere pragmatism is insufficient for restricting speech or the closing down of platforms. It would be much simpler if we could make case-by-case decisions based on cost-benefit or risk-reward, but we don't.

I know that people wish to just cut the head off the snake, but our norms caution against that and our laws prevent governments from doing it.

[hackerlight]

Well, I don't live in the USA. Free speech purism is a US-specific sociocultural product that most people don't subscribe to.

Even then, I'd say that the USA has decided no such thing. What you're talking about is a modern civic religion and ideology that some but not all Usonians subscribe to. But the creation of law in the US has always been a pragmatic exercise. The electoral college was a highly imperfect pragmatic compromise. Exceptions to 1A were pragmatic lines being drawn. There's no God-given reason why defamation should be illegal but bullying to the point of suicide should be legal. Roe v Wade was pragmatic line drawing at the point of fetal viability. Look at how many pragmatic compromises are behind the inflation reduction act.

[cmsj]

If communities are formed with the sole purpose of being a haven for horrible people to further radicalise each other, it's perfectly reasonable for society's antibodies to destroy those communities.

[salawat]

Tech companies are not society's immune system, and if that's how you see yourself, please stop. Nor is it the case we should aspire to put ourselves into the capacity of being the instrumentality over and above what the jurisdictions we operate in demand, and even then, there's a mandate to push back some in the interests of the public.

Nor is Twitter for that matter; nor is KiwiFarms, nor is CloudFlare. P