alt Hacker NewsI'm not sure that would work. How about spam or adverts? That's protected speech. And downranking based on viewpoint is not any different from censoring.
Yeah you can say X but no one will see it.
I can see potentially requiring platforms to moderate in a "viewpoint neutral" way, though, which only applies if you have ~5% of potential customer base as users.
It would at least create a diseconomy of scale and discourage centralization.
Sounds like you’re talking about the presumed free speech rights of corporations, which is part of this debate. I think corporations should have much more limited speech than an actual person and the concept of corporate personhood in general needs to be walked back significantly.
Yes it’s important for news organization and such to have unrestricted speech, but that seems solvable by keeping them in a separate category and excluding corps that engage in other lines of business. I don’t want say Google to be have full censorship and editorial privileges just because one of their many products surfaces news.