They don't care about free speech or cooperating with one of the biggest enemy of Free Speech in the world (China) when there is potential revenue to be made.
here we are, 3 years later. It sounds to me like FB discusses the idea and never implemented it. I’m not sure we can fault a company for exploring contingency plans with China...
Forcing sites to have a completely laissez-faire approach to user generated content seems to avoid liability for that user content seems like something that would destroy the internet. Like why would YC take on that risk to help us maintain a space free of spam or threats of violence?
I too remember "the destroyed" internet of yesteryear. We're in a much better place now that 5 companies control your opinion and your access to counter opinions.
>Like why would YC take on that risk to help us maintain a space free of spam or threats of violence?
No. We're talking about legal things that the PUBLISHER just doesn't like. Illegal things are always on the table for moderation. Don't try and make the argument about spam. You know very well that the issue here is a room of "content curators" artificially removing "trending" things because of political ideology, or government requested censorship, or just whoever bought the most ads that month.
The issue is in some cases “they” (FANNG, Reddit, Twitter, etc) want to be platforms like Facebook saying ads aren’t their responsibility, and in some cases are acting as publishers by censoring otherwise legal content they do not like or agree with. There are memes that will get you instantly suspended from Facebook, while you and Facebook argue no one could possibly monitor content!
It shouldn’t be that the giants get to be both. Legally they are provided protections against content on their system - but historically this only applies to platforms where the content is entirely unfiltered. Think if your telco cut the call when you said the words “Jeffery Epstein didn’t kill himself” as a fictitious example, they shouldn’t get liability protection for things people say if they’re going to curate the content like that.