> Free speech is free speech and must be protected at all costs, even if 99% of people think an idea is reprehensible.
Opinion. But also, no one's First Amendment rights was violated here. No one has a right to post on a website.
I've spent quite a bit of time trying to compare the idea of a physical building for discussion (privately owned, to make the comparison fair) to a website like Twitter. I've come to the conclusion that if I ran a physical building where anyone could rent it out, and it came to light that neo-Nazis or other horrible people were using it, there would probably be protests. People would gather outside, or forcibly enter the building to disrupt it, or make my life difficult. While you can argue that this is mob rule, this is how society functions. If you're doing something a lot of people find reprehensible, they're going to let you know about it, and they're going to encourage others to join them.
> These people aren't going to shrug and walk away because a website goes down, they'll congregate somewhere else.
That might seem to be the case at first glance.
[0], 6.3:
>By shutting down these echo chambers of hate, Reddit caused the people participating to either leave the site or dramatically change their linguistic behavior (as measured via our hate lexicons).
[0], 6.6:
> Recent work has shown that some banned subreddit users migrated to other social media sites like Voat, Snapzu, and Empeopled.
However, the numbers were smaller than expected:
[1], 7:
> Despite the hysteria concerning a mass exodus from Reddit, our behavior trend analysis shows that no such exodus occurred, though a small user migration was apparent.
Furthermore, of the sites listed, the one that was most notorious for free speech absolutism (Voat) was shut down due to lack of funding. The others appear to all be up, albeit Empeopled is apparently being rebuilt on the blockchain - I'm sure that will go well.
[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3134666
[1] https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/14750/1459...