If your website's registered userbase is 1/4 of the population of the entire planet, then yes, that's what we're telling you.

It's no longer _your_ free speech.

What's the exact threshold? Just curious so I can make sure to stifle my business growth so as not to give up my free speech to not host racist content.

It's the publisher vs platform debate. If you're curating content based off of promoting your company's vision of acceptable free speech, then you become a publisher and a whole different set of rules apply to you. You're liable for much more in the eyes of the law.

You can't cherry pick the advantages of both and hide under the guise of being an open platform.

I think the terminology we have here for publisher and platform don't exactly fit this scenario. I think it'd be wise to find a new label and set of rules that better fits this type of company.

If you want to take that tactic it's probably just better to reframe the argument.

Most of the problems that come from being a massive social media juggernaut like facebook/twitter/etc come from those services being free.

Being free is what makes them massive monopolies and gives them such broad reach. I think 99% of the problem cases AND the lack of competition in the market could be plugged by breaking the ad-supported/VC-supported model and forcing these companies to charge something to their customers.

Absolutely not! I'd be interested in knowing how you came to the conclusion that was my argument.

Rather, it is important for society to support free speech, not just the government. While society is under no obligation to, it's unhealthy to censor speech.

It's even worse when society self censors free speech, and then pretends to still advocate it.

I was taking the point to an extreme. You're saying a society should support free speech so Facebook should let the white nationalist content stay on their site (by their own good will, not forced by government). Is that not accurate?

Deciding what I allow on my site is an exercise of my free speech. Why is hosting white nationalist free speech more important than my free speech to not host racist content?

the difference is that youtube/facebook are not publications themselves, but platforms that allow you to publish. So you already aren't deciding what to host, as a user-content driven site, you by default allow anything, then naturally hopefully for moral reasons but necessarily legal ones, you ban illegal content. Beyond that, it still is a privately hosted thing so I'd still agree that your self run user-content based site may ban whatever it likes. However when you reach a general use size, where people rely on your platform for free speech, things certainly feel different. I'm not sure what the right move is, but I don't think its as simple as "my private site is my private site, thats the end of it"

>I'm not sure what the right move is, but I don't think its as simple as "my private site is my private site, thats the end of it"

Well get back to me when you've worked out exactly when a private entity shouldn't be able to decide what content they allow. This ambiguity is really too difficult to figure out.

I don't know, or I'd know what the right move is! For this, its sort of a "you know it when you see it" thing, as facebook/youtube/twitter are major platforms used by everyone, and so they feel a lot more like an online town square than a private space. So they are definitely past the line, and ought to have different rules on what content is allowed/disallowed than smaller lower population platforms.

I can agree with you. It's something I've been thinking about lately and I keep coming back to how you'd define this in legal terms. It's tough.

The problem is, if they are forced to allow "any legal content", they'll be overrun with spammers and other no-goods, and the users who just want to keep up with their family will all leave.

What about the legal risk associated with letting the Frog Brigade post their terrorist cookbook on your platform? Does Zuckerberg have to come to their house and load the bullets into the gun for them so they can make a statement about how angry they are? Because he made an app for people to cheat? I fail to see the connection.

>What about the legal risk associated with letting the Frog Brigade post their terrorist cookbook on your platform?

Like I said, banning illegal content is the first step that anyone ought to take. Generally this is done via moderation staff of the site + user submitted reports. If you're providing a free platform and terrorists start using it as their communication channel, then you're only at legal risk if you do nothing to stop them. However, I'm imagining things like the NZ shooter's 8chan post, where a direct threat is made or a direct implication of violent acts to come. Posting a "terrorist cookbook" actually is a good example, as its sort of right on the line. It seems to be the sort of information that only has negative uses, on the other hand its just information, as opposed to an actual threat. I'm not really sure if such things should be allowed... it could be helpful to terrorists which is bad, but also censoring information is nearly impossible and almost always seems the wrong way to go.

>Does Zuckerberg have to come to their house and load the bullets into the gun for them so they can make a statement about how angry they are? Because he made an app for people to cheat? I fail to see the connection.

As do I...I really don't get what you're trying to say here, can you restate?

That's property infringement, not violating speech.

There is a huge difference between your website in which you post in your name, and Facebook which was created as a platform to allow billions of people to post in their name.