They then disingeniously say "this is the decision of a private company, free speech only applies to the government" even though they were the ones that forced the company's hand.
Complete censorship is not possible with this strategy, because there will always be other ways to get the speech out, but it may well be censored from as large a percentage of people as in a dictatorship.
Personally I agree with the ACLU position on this, but also believe that privately owned publishing platforms should be free to establish their own policies on what they will or will not carry. That's their right as private entities.
Excepting explicit regulation such as common carrier. I don't think anyone is saying it would be OK for the phone companies to cut off KKK members phone service.
I don't know how true that is, but if so... it stands to reason that free speech on the internet could be in danger. But who knows, maybe we'll get better DDoS protection technology in the future :)
Are you opposed to net neutrality, then? If not, why the different standard for ISPs vs other tech oligopolies?
I count ISPs clearly in the infrastructure category, same with cloudflare, domain providers and AWS.
I'd count the latter among the infrastructure companies.
If there are some restrictions we want as a society, like age or porn, those could be made exceptions.
Regarding private forums, I'd distinguish between forums that seek to serve 99% of people and those that serve less than 1%. The first are public; the latter are private.
Facebook is just the last platform in a stack of platforms people use to communicate. Why would Facebook be allowed to restrict content while those who provide the services Facebook is built on wouldn't?
Publishing platforms explicitly manage content. They provide tools to create, edit, transform and manage content. They provide facilities to control content distribution and subscription. That's clearly a different class of service. You can't reasonably argue that a service that actually facilitates the creation and routing of content can't influence what content is created or routed. They already do so explicitly in their choice and design of tooling.
Various social networks use 'relevance' metrics, keywords in the text, timeliness and all sorts of criteria to choose how to distribute or sort and highlight content and they change these algorithms over time. They are part of the value the service provides and clearly their responsibility.
Title IX and broadly written anti-discrimination regulations.
The primary question is what direction the authoritarian types will attack it from legally / politically. The main vehicle has to be the intentionally vague hate speech approach, which they've been readying and building up for decades. To regulate it into action, they'll have to argue the Internet (the primary medium that matters now) is under FCC broadcast control just as with traditional radio and broadcast TV. Then they'll task any Internet content publishing platforms with obeying and enforcing the new hate speech limitations. Those new rules will vary with the political winds and be aggressively abused by each administration and major political shift in DC. It'll become a form of shifting thought terror brought down upon the American people (what can/can't I express changing every 4 to 8 years); by the time the public realizes what has happened, it'll be far too late, their speech - their last line of defense - will be gone.