I am not sure the "town square" defence is useful if you cannot exclude certain content reliably and effectively
Beyond what is already existing illegal speech, such as telling someone to cause a specific crime, the whole point of this EFF article is that 'excluding certain content' does more harm than good.
But by indexing and then returning search results you are choosing and selecting - maybe being able to find "grot porn" or "that video of muslims being killed" is a public good (!) but if it is then I struggle to see how adverts and other minimisation schemes will not influence your decision to return it - the very act of making something findable is a curation decision - and curation implies responsibility.
Perhaps we will work around it by having google publish it algorithm for search results - but that gets gnarly fast.
In short I think webspace is like selling white banners and pens to a political rally - what people write on them is their business. But once you look at the banners and start to hand them out on street corners you are engaging in political speech - and worse speech someone else has written.
i used to work for Demon Internet and our big USP (so we thought) was free webspace (10MB!!). And if you published your work on there you then needed to go through various cycles to get someone to come and read it - but Google and facebook have a domain name based leverage going on that means putting my stuff on facebook makes it easier to be found by orders of magnitude - and that implies curation and promotion of speech.
In short - there is no "hands off approach" to free speech that is not hard disk space. And we and FAANG need to deal with the responsibility
Edit: if you have the right to say awful things, you don't necessarily have the right to have those things promoted and published by some of the largest companies on the planet - but if they choose to edit your speech they need to start obeying everyone's speech laws (globally impossible) - so perhaps they should be split into Elizabeth Warrens platforms - and that would presumably allow duckduckgo to run its requests across google hardware and indexes on a free competition basis....
Youtube has (imo) two functions - an independent hosting platform (which can argue it is not appropriate for it to censor content) and a search engine which implies a recommendation algorithm. This second part is inescapably making editorial decisions.
I don't think Santa Clara principles are sufficient at this point - it's basically assuming Facebook et al run a "town square".
I am not sure the "town square" defence is useful if you cannot exclude certain content reliably and effectively (definitely an unproven point)
I know this is heading down the Warren route - but Inwoukd be grateful for other thoughts
Final note: I cannot conceive what twisted neurons male gunning unarmed people as a good idea, let alone livestreaming it but I will be unsurprised to find that the killer has live-streamed previous sick rubbish and got lots of likes and comments.
Doing that in a normal town square would not have built a bubble of morons who laugh at a guy pretend killing muslims till the guy actually goes and does it - it would have built horrified approbium of a normal town. It's not a town square if the rest of the town does not see you.