The EFF is arguing here that companies should not take anything down and instead rely on the government to dictate what shouldn't be allowed. This is absolutely ridiculous. Imagine being such a free speech advocate that you say something like this.
If they can pick and choose whatever message they like with absolute discretion, then that's effectively the corporation's speech and should be treated as such, with full responsibility over it.
If they don't want to bear the responsibility for what they publish, then it's easy, don't pretend to have the legitimacy to choose.
That the same social media platform can have as big of a change in views as Twitter/X did is insane to me. That's not "the public changing opinion". That's a corporation exercising speech. Full stop.
There is no functional world where no one is allowed to moderate abuse, because in that world the Internet ceases to function. You don't have to like the results, but someone has to do it.
Why is a belief in the common carrier model ridiculous?
And make no mistake, that's 99% of what KiwiFarms does, the last time this came up on hackernews I browsed through hundreds of posts in a bunch of threads to see if there was anything other than that going on, so if its there it's in the DMs (and policing person-to-person communication is utterly insane) or very rare.
It's not so much about the particular site.
Start by banning racists and bigoted users, then slowly start discriminating against other groups while offering new "private connection" for only $9.99/mo extra.
The only reason that those are despicable nowadays is precisely because minorities and their supporters, which were considered despicable at the time, exercised their freedom of speech.
Instead on censoring speech why not provide tools that lead to better speech? This is perfectly possible from a tech stand point but companies would rather have the power that comes from censorship.
1. Get rid of anonymity/pseudonymity. Free speech is a right. Anonymity is not. If people had to post everything in their real name you would get rid of all of the fake b.s. and people would be much more civilized in their speech.
2. Provide content filtering tools based on user voting with a public record of user votes and the option for people to turn off the filters so that they can see what is filtered.
With these 2 mechanisms you can create a public square with absolute free speech where hate speech is filtered and suppressed, if people choose that, but the records are clear and people who want to audit the filtering can do so as they please.
The internet has saved many people by opening up questions you wouldn't ask your doctor.
the most popular services (facebook/instagram, twitter) are the ones that have the most real people posting stuff under their real names.
those companies continue to allow fake users for a variety of financial reasons but the fake users are actively degrading the experience.
twitter is working on KYC now, but it is a cheap AI version that is easily exploitable, so it won't make much of a difference (as i understand it so far).
Are you actually fine with this? I can't help but notice you're not posting under your real name...
The EFF is so detached from humanity it doesn't mind innocent people dying for it's radical free speech cause. And that's really pretty sad.