They would become even bigger breeding grounds for alt-right conspiracy theories and outright hate speech.
We know this because this has already been happening. Even with the ability to remove hate speech from their platforms, this sort of content gets surfaced by their algorithms with horrifying regularity.
But humans do not do this. We make decisions based on what others around us are doing, on what the people we see as our team are doing, to show that we belong, no matter how stupid or ignorant those decisions are. In this world, unlimited Free Speech creates chaos. And that is the world we live in now.
Free Speech is a good. But it is not the highest good. And the sooner we realize that the better off all humans will be.
Incidents like the one in the article are collateral damage to this policy.
Dont the top 2% that actually own these corporation control them?
Reddit also cracked down on Syrian civil war media around this time. The videos were often gruesome propaganda and evidence of war crimes at the same time.
The reason people called on social media to remove this material instead of making it a job for law enforcement is that First Amendment protections are very broad. Praising ISIS or sharing "inspirational" videos of them killing government soldiers is not a crime if it doesn't also call for imminent lawless action. But few Americans of any political affiliation want such material to spread freely online, so it has been suppressed by other means on major platforms.
I'm not endorsing or condemning how these platforms behave. I'm just pointing out that they have long suppressed material that the First Amendment protects. The timeline of moderation well predates the Trump presidency.
I don't mean to be snarky, but to try to draw a line. There are goods and rights that are intrinsically important (say food, water, social life, freedom from crime) and some that are important for the maintaining of a society (contracts are a good example here).
One of these "to maintain a society" freedoms is due process. Another, free speech. Both are important for their own sake, but also to check and control power.
You can say, and it is reasonable to say, that not suffering the ill effects of crime is more important than having good due process. But, given that due process is an important check on those in power, whenever they say "we need to reduce due process to get better law enforcement", you should be wary.
To sum up: some seemingly rational trades between values are dangerous, especially since they reduce our ability to influence society/to undo those trades.
Sunlight is ALWAYS the best disinfectant. Free speech is the first amendment in the US Constitution because those that wrote it had first hand experience what life is like without it.
Transparency allows us to see what's going on inside companies, and make sure that they're not making decisions that are to the detriment of our society as a whole.
Unlimited free speech allows bigots and fascists to spread their poison unobstructed, which demonstrably helps them to recruit more people into their white supremacist, genocidal, and anti-democratic movements. Meanwhile, as a cost to maintain this "principle", thousands (and more) of real people are being hurt or killed, or having their livelihoods destroyed, simply because of the way they were born.
In my opinion, the best way to give credence to these kinds of beliefs is to drive them underground. Now you have people whispering from the bushes about the topic to people they think might be swayed to join them and no one is around to counter what they are saying. The best way to keep people from believing these kinds of things is to let their proponents speak, and then call them on it. Joe Gullible will at least be able to see both sides.
Similarly, the best way to unlearn bigotry is to converse with people you are bigoted towards about a range of topics. Eventually you learn that they are just people, like everyone else. The same thing could happen with politics if we stopped being shoved into bubbles (or willingly building them up).
Unfortunately, advertisers don't want to place ads where contentious discussions occur and big companies don't want to lose advertising revenue, so here we are.
There is also the potential problem of censoring people who actually do hold a valid evidence-based opinion on a topic, it's just not one that's politically en vogue currently. Not to mention all the topics where it isn't clear what the truth is, despite a plethora of evidence for and against, and the person in charge holds a strong opinion on it.
What I'm saying, I guess, is "citation needed". Show me your evidence that people don't change their opinions based on evidence and maybe I'll change my opinion on this topic :)
Of course, those currently a part of the Christian, American far right would be pleading for more regulation on free speech.