Federation is what it's called now, but back in the Old Days it was Usenet or Email or, to a lesser extent, FidoNet or any of a few other BBS UUCP-a-likes. Everyone hosts their own copies of everything, there is no central system, and there is no one to threaten if you want to remove anything.
Usenet still exists and the only ads on it are parasitic spammers. Ditto email.
We have always had a solution to this. The party responsible for identifying the Really Bad Stuff is the government, the party who goes to jail is the user who posted it, and the extent of the platform's responsibility should be to remove the content in response to a court order (which the uploader would have the right to argue their case against).
This makes removing content expensive -- it requires litigation. This is on purpose. It then satisfies the concern with CP, because that is serious enough for the government to expend the resources to get the court order. But it serves as a bottleneck to casual censorship, and it removes the responsibility for making legality determinations from the intermediaries who are totally unqualified to be making them.
The really horrible things can and do happen regardless of whether you make platforms liable for user content.
> and a bit less likely that children will have horrible things done to them.
There is no real evidence that is true and several reasons to expect that it isn't, in much the same ways that SESTA made life more difficult and dangerous for sex workers.
Too many essays about "free speech" focus on stating principles that feel good to read and agree with. However, the more difficult analysis is how to implement a true free speech platform.
That's the puzzle nobody talks about: how to make a uncensorable free speech platform that's financially sustainable.
If one does Ctrl+F in Robinson's essay to search for "advertisers" or "sponsors", those terms are not mentioned once. Youtube/Facebook/Twitter are funded by advertisers. Youtube isn't the arbiter of diverse topics, it's the advertisers. And indirectly, it's the mainstream viewers that arbitrate what's viewable because they threaten to boycott the advertisers. (Previous comment about this.[1])
If big advertisers like Proctor & Gamble, Coca Cola, etc want to stop paying for ads because the platforms host controversial topics, how does this utopian vision of free speech get funded? That never seems to be discussed.
Some alternative funding possibilities:
- pass a law that requires advertisers to pay for unsavory content (e.g. including Nazi, Alt-Right, beheadings, etc.) However, this type of radical law seems impossible to pass.
- create a new communications platform that's funded by the government (e.g. the USA government?) that allows anything except for child pornography. This just shifts the problem and whatever government that runs the site will eventually start censoring particular topics they don't like. Also, if the website does not censor, it will devolve into a cesspool and mainstream audiences won't bother to log into it. This is an example "freedom of speech" eating its own tail because the big audiences voluntarily shun it.
- a uncensorable blockchain publishing platform. I see no realistic projects that non-techies want to use. Mastodon instances are run (and funded) by volunteers and by its nature, it won't be the true free speech platform people are looking for.
Let's discuss the challenge of realistic implementations instead of repeating the same complaints about popular websites closing off topics. They are beholden to advertisers and therefore making editorial decisions to maintain a viable business. Complaining about content filtering decisions driven by financial self-preservation isn't going to solve the problem.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18372005