These problems aren’t easy, and while I’ve lessened my free speech absolutism a tiny bit, I’m still quite concerned. We have to find a better way.
However, groups of private citizens, whose powers over the marketplace are/can be heavily limited through existing laws such as antitrust law, enforced by our democratically elected government have no requirement to carry speech they disagree with.
It’s surprising to me how quickly the Big Business/Small Government Republican Party switched as soon as they realized that big businesses don’t always have their interests in mind. I suggest looking over to the far left, as they have been discussing ways to curb power of large businesses for decades and also have a healthy respect of the dangers of giving the government too much power as the frequent target of said powers.
I'm personally very pro free speech but the wrong way to go about it is to give the government more power to compel speech from third parties. Use the tools available to prevent mega corporations from sucking up all the air in the room, then create your own platforms to spread the speech you want to enable.
The easy approach of just trying to use government to compel these companies to carry your speech has too many dangerous second and third order effects to seriously consider, especially if your goal is free-speech.
The left has plenty of respect for the dangers of both private and public power, but our system doesn’t listen to them because it requires a reflection on the bad parts of capitalism.
Twitter and Facebook profit off of speech on their platforms, and actively drive users to content that increase engagement. Furthermore they have no accountability when they cancel people and businesses, which again, the left knows about. We can change the incentives and repercussions without encouraging them to censor speech they unilaterally don’t like.