> I don't think it is fair to consider large-scale censorship as the only other alternative. Having some kind of neutral editorial process to filter out the unsubstantiated, hateful opinions and leave room for a more nuanced discussion raises the level of discourse, and is the model that have been offered by traditional media for a long time.

The problem with this view is that one person's hateful opinion is another person's oppressed minority opinion. There aren't many objective truths, moderators just end up enforcing their own world view (which we've already seen Facebook do).

I did not claim that it was a perfect system, but it is better at avoiding devolving into the hateful rage-soup that unedited online forums often do. It is virtually impossible to have a system that is "perfectly balanced" (can we even define what that means?), so rejecting alternatives on those grounds is holding them to unrealistically high standards.

To be fair, 'unedited internet communication in general' shouldn't be expected to improve public discourse any more than telephone calls or emails or any other form of uncensored expression.

If the internet is meant to be a platform on which people can express themselves freely (and I believe it is) then unsubstantiated and hateful opinions are a given, not a sign that the internet has failed, but that it's succeeded.

What failed is the naive, idealist expectation that the internet would raise the level of intellectual and cultural awareness of the planet, but I don't think many people really believed in that to begin with.

> I think it is fair to criticize unedited internet communication in general, as we have just recently learned that this form of communication did not result in the improvement of public discourse

It depends on how exactly you define 'improvement'. Millions of people, speaking freely to each other, finding new friends sharing common interests would disagree with you.

It is not universally bad, of course. The question is if the bad consequences outweigh the good ones.

The improvement I was talking about was the hope that the increased access to online communication would engage more people in constructive public discourse, include the voices of minorities and bring people with different backgrounds to a greater understanding of each other. Platforms like Facebook have utterly failed at that.