Any time you open the paper, turn on the TV, crack open a book, or visit Hacker News, you are trusting some curator, gatekeeper, editor, or censor's judgement.

Even bazaars like 4chan are moderated.

And the unmoderated spaced of before don't exist any more (Usenet), because companies didn't make money on it. Or worse, because it violated some company's "right".

Now, in order to speak, you nearly have to go through one of Their gateways. If you piss off FAMGA (Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon), you're gone off the net. Some of those gatekeepers are big scripts with no human intervention for your level. If you fall between the cracks, then you have no recourse, other than find a place like HN and beg publicly - lest you get shitcanned by the HN gatekeepers.

"If you piss off FAMGA (Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon), you're gone off the net."

No, you're not. Not even close. The Daily Stormer is still online; you will be too.

So should it be illegal to run a curated platform?

It certainly presents problems when all the most popular channels for communication are controlled by a handful of companies.

And that they grew to this point before imposing this "curation". It seems to be a recurring theme with these companies to grow to a monopoly with a place for relatively free discourse and then to do this as soon as they feel safe.

The incentives are aligned that way... once you're big the biggest thing is protecting your position.

To be fair information is a weapon and there should be no free reign for anyone. If you are on purpose suppressing some information to fulfil political agenda - that should be a criminal act.

Ok, but what about the opposite: What if you are, on purpose, constantly disseminating false information to fulfill a political agenda?

So what's a political agenda?

Is the promotion of cats a political agenda? Can allcats.com take down videos of dogs?

> Can allcats.com take down videos of dogs?

Sure. Why shouldn't a private entity be able to determine what kind of speech they allow on their own property?

Because if they have a huge defacto monopoly, and also a outsized impact on our culture, the impacts of them doing so are far more far-reaching than, say, LiveLeak removing some video (trying to think of a competitor for YT is surprisingly hard).

It's interesting. I think we're at a strange period in history where personal speech can reach such a huge audience, thus new ways of suppressing speech are being invented.

Youtube is a private service, thus they can remove content as they wish. Of course, most forms of historical media have also removed or suppressed controversial content. But in the old days it was preemptive. There was only so much room in a newspaper, you had to own presses and a distribution network, and they didn't hire just any schmoe to write columns.

It was a proactive system of censorship. They got people invested in a career of finding the proper stories and promoting what was acceptable to the establishment. Obviously common people could say whatever they like in their daily lives, but their freedom to put content into a newspaper or television show for all to see was extremely limited.

We have enormous freedom in self-publishing mass media today. So much content is being created that no mortal person can serve as gatekeeper and pick and choose what gets published like a newspaper editor could. So on one hand, we're living in a utopia of free speech. But new ways are being devised to automatically manage content all the time. And even though human moderators don't catch everything, but they slowly do what they can.

There are some genuinely harmful ideas out there, of course. Some things that ought to be restricted. Who gets to decide? Is it right for a private company to choose? I doubt it, but private companies have always been choosing what gets into media. In the past their decisions were much more totalitarian than today.