Their defence is always "we are private companies so we do whatever they want" - which wouldn't fly if they were a water company refusing service arbitrarily.
Further reading: 4chan.
Anyway, I think you can have freedom of speech and moderation. I don't think it's a violation of freedom of speech to have certain areas dedicated to specific topics, in which off-topic posts get removed. As long as all speech has somewhere it can be posted (e.g. by allowing users to create their own sub-forums where they decide the rules for themselves).
For instance one of the (board specific) rules of /int/ is to respect other cultures and people but half the (non-general) threads are either blatant bait or arguing about how other people in country/region X cannot suffer.
At this point a few competent programmers who knows web tech and can either use cloud or set up their own operations on cheap bare metal servers can start a social network. The bar only gets lower over time as it gets cheaper and easier to run large Internet services.
The barrier is even lower if you include running your own simple web forum, board, or a fediverse node. Anyone who knows a little sysadmin and can afford a $20/month VPS can do that.
I do agree that there should be regulations around net neutrality that prevent ISPs and backbone carriers from discriminating against any legal form of traffic since those are more like the water company, but the fact that everything is encrypted these days makes that kind of discrimination hard anyway.
As with most open systems, big social is succumbing to spam. In the case of social the primary form of spam is outrage porn and similar lizard brain engaging material. The bigger a social network is and the less moderated it is, the more this material dominates.
If you try to moderate you drive people away toward niche networks. If you don’t try to moderate, all the toxic rage bait and trolling drives people away to niche networks. This is how big social dies.
The future is niche networks with niche moderation policies, private boards and chat rooms, and the fediverse which is actually thousands of niche social networks in a trenchcoat.
Regulation means that companies have to follow arbitrary rules, including rules that you may not like. Wait until every social site is legally required to ban you if you violate a given rule.
The social networking space seems to be working itself out It's just a slow process.
Tried it? Difficult is an understatement. As you point out though, "miscellaneous billionaire(s)" can try. That's hardly the same thing as the first days when Twitter started.
> Regulation means that companies have to follow arbitrary rules, including rules that you may not like.
I'm going to presume your use of the word arbitrary there is a result of a lack of faith in government. As little faith as _I_ have in government though, I wouldn't call regulations arbitrary. Anyway ...
> Wait until every social site is legally required to ban you if you violate a given rule.
Fine with me. There are plenty of laws I don't agree with, but follow because the rule of law is more important than getting laws right (aligned to my opinion). This is not least because we can do something about those laws we disagree with in a civil way.
I'm fairly certain I'd get punished on these sites if the current social justice trends became law. That works well, because then we'd be able to go through an established public process to change them — rather than a private company deciding their own laws, with no recourse.
Can they really?
At least on Zuckerberg's side Threads' competitiveness would have been impossible without piggy backing on the back of Instagram. He was willing to possibly cannibalise an existing product in the Meta portfolio, to hopefully take away share from a competitor's product. I'm not sure how well that strategy works, and there will surely be organic growth, but will be talking about Threads in 2 years or will it be a Google Circles?
I'm also sure they factored this in at Meta. Perhaps they determined that one Threads user will be more valuable than one IG user, so even if it were a 1:1 cannibalisation, it would be worth it. I'm really curious what the Threads roadmap looks like, because if they are truly going after Twitter, Musk has been fairly clear that Twitter is to be an everything app, a la WeChat.
It also has consequences. You are literally saying things to people's faces, they can see yours. So if you start spouting your protected "kill all n*** and kikes" speech, they can follow you back home. Social media is populated by bots, sock puppets and impersonators, very different.
2. "Following you home" is in best case harassment, worst case assault. Don't legitimise lynch mobs, please.
Part of the town square is actually being accountable for what you say, which the on-line troll world avoids. How to align free speech with unaccountability?
Yes, there should be limits, but those should be way less restrictive than most modern social media (ban on anything controversial)
Also, I think accountability shouldn't be confused with lynch mobs - calling people to be fired or deplatformed isn't "natural consequences/accountability", it's using harassment to hurt someone else.