You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.

Free speech does not cover scams and fraud, something that happens on their platform. Society doesn't take any action against them for publishing illegal content, scams, libel, fraud, because they aren't a newspaper. They're more like a newspaper printing house.

In my opinion they should probably be losing those protections and should suffer legal consequences for the content their users post. The moderation has reached a point where they ate defacto editorialising content.

An alternative to that could be opting in to some kind of third party moderation arbitration process.

> wouldn't that violate free speech though?

Free speech can mean two things:

(1) The general philosophical postulate, that society is better when there is a high level of freedom in the exchange of ideas and critique of other's ideas.

(2) One aspect of the above is that government should not censor speech. Like the 1st amendment in USA.

But if most public discourse takes place on forums owned by companies, and the companies start to practice high levels of censorship, then we might formally satisfy (2) but still won't get the cultural benefits of (1).

Free speech is specifically limiting the government’s ability to limit your speech, not private enterprise, and its limited to the US. The US government can legally try to restrict the speech of … I don’t know let’s say Palestinians.

I'd think, in a sane world, an individuals free speech trumps a company's.

No. We compel and restrict commercial speech all the time.

> wouldn't that violate free speech though?

It's balancing the company's freedom of association against the individual's freedom of speech.

Look, the world criticised Facebook for facilitating a genocide in Burma [1]. There is a moral argument for American social media companies policing their speech to some degree. But that doesn't mean there shouldn't also be a process of appeal, data offloading, et cetera.

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

Requiring a provider of a public accommodation to explain their decisions and have standard policies for implementing them is no restriction on free speech.

It shouldn't. But under this Supreme Court it might.

Corporations are creations of the state and treating them as strictly private, especially when they're trampling rights, is illiberal horse-shit, and is straight up insulting when done under the guise of defending liberalism. And there's plenty of room for nuance, we don't have to (and already do not) regulate family businesses or 50-employee enterprises like we do transnational mega corporations with more capital than many entire countries.

Don't conflate the broad concept of free speech, with the specific attempt at its defense that is the 1st amendment of the US constitution.

Giant unaccountable companies privatizing the public square harms free speech. Forcing them to at least reveal why something was censored would help free speech more than it would harm it. Unless you subscribe to the myopic legalistic 1st amendment position that "free speech" is maximized when companies can act with the least restrictions, no matter how unable to speak or be heard that makes individuals, so long as it wasn't the government that silenced them.