It would be a violation of the 1st Amendment to require Twitch to host objectionable content against their will. Freedom of association and freedom not to speak is part of the 1st Amendment. I am very doubtful a proposal that mandated that Twitch had to host certain streamers would survive a court challenge. This is like looking at declining church membership and arguing that the only way to preserve Freedom of Religion is to mandate that everyone needs to go to church.

And there are ways to attack censorship that don't require throwing out the Constitution. Ways like antitrust, like expanding Internet access and building infrastructure to make self-hosting easier, like providing government-run alternatives to certain services like financial payment networks -- services that would be subject to the 1st Amendment. We could revise copyright so it's easier to build content mirroring sites and migrate people off of social media/streaming sites into other services. We could revise the CFAA so that it's easier to build migration tools without getting sued by Facebook. We could start putting even a tiny bit of effort into not allowing Amazon/Apple/Google to look at new markets that are attractive and just buy the entire space.

I don't think you're mad that Twitch is moderating, Twitch has to moderate to some degree. You're mad that there are realistically only 2-3 usable streaming services and that our Internet infrastructure and Internet laws are set up in such a way as to encourage that kind of consolidation, to allow companies like Amazon to buy anyone who competes with them, and to sue anyone who builds compatible wrappers and services in a way that might make it easier to migrate off of Twitch.

And sometimes I bring up antitrust and decentralization and people accuse me of not being realistic, but honestly, does anyone really believe that antitrust is harder than passing a Constitutional amendment? Because it's not, antitrust doesn't require 38 states to ratify it. I genuinely do not understand the point of view that looks at mass media consolidation and says that revising the 1st Amendment is a preferable alternative to breaking up Amazon.

There are already communication companies that are basically forced to host content that they object to right?

Those are called common carrier laws, and they apply to things like the phone company, which are communication companies.

You would be hard pressed to get the Supreme Court to rule that the same standards could be applied to a media company. The fairness doctrine met similar objections, and that was never applied to companies using cable, just public broadcasts. In this particular instance, we're talking about Twitch ending partner relationships. It's a hard sell to say that Net Neutrality or rationing limited airwaves is the same as forcing Twitch to pay a streamer money or to put them in a privileged position above other streamers.

And if your plan is to create the same kind of restrictions that you see around, say, Net Neutrality, then that still isn't going to create the environment that you want, because Net Neutrality also protects stuff like harassment, disturbing/gross content, and pornography -- it isn't narrowly applied to a privileged sub-category of speech. In other words, common carrier laws protect your political speech, but they're not specifically designed to protect your political speech. They also protect a lot of stuff that people don't want to see on their Facebook feed.

Even more broadly though, when we talk about revising the Constitution, we're talking about free speech ideals, not just legislation. And while the legislative conversation is worth having, it's also worth acknowledging that community moderation is a free speech ideal. The entire marketplace of ideas is based on the philosophy that some ideas win and lose, and that some ideas become unpopular over time. The entire point of Freedom of Association is that people can form communities and have productive conversations on diverse topics without getting constantly shouted down or harassed. Community moderation and subgroups and forums with strict rules are part of how we encourage a diversity of opinions online; they're why we can have this conversation on Hackernews without someone jumping in and trying to sell penis enlargement pills or telling us all to kill ourselves.

So on one hand if we're having a conversation about laws, it is going to be very difficult to get the Supreme Court to go along with most of the "neutral platform" proposals I've heard[0]. On the other hand if we're having a conversation about ideals, Freedom of Association is something we should care about in and of itself, and we should want to preserve that as much as possible -- we should only be looking at getting rid of Freedom of Association in places where we literally have no other choice. Compelled speech is extremely dangerous, it shouldn't be the first thing we try.

And luckily, we have a lot of precedent on alternative ways to get speech to flourish online. When people refer back to the "good old days" when the Internet cared about speech, there was plenty of moderation back then. There were just also a bunch of independent IRC rooms, independent websites, more freedom to be pseudononymous, and everyone's entire life wasn't tied to a single Google account that could be shut down at any time. So the first thing we try should be to increase platform diversity, because we already have compelling evidence that platform diversity increases speech.

[0]: Particularly a Conservative Supreme Court with people like Barrett, who are probably not inclined to say that 1st Amendment protections shouldn't apply to companies that directly interact with consumers. With the exception of people like Thomas, I do not see much eagerness from Conservative justices to strip free speech protections from companies.

The moderation team of twitch is pretty much universally hated by the internet. I don't think anybody is cheering them on.

We should talk about those things in public - and not everyone will agree. That's how it's supposed to be.

It's brand new, however, to wield the power to literally cut off your political enemies from more than half of the population with a single click of the mouse.

Also this article states that Twitch that the misconduct is this:

"It said examples of this “severe misconduct” include terrorist activities, child sexual exploitation, violent extremism, credible threats of mass violence, carrying out or deliberately acting as an accomplice to sexual assault and threatening Twitch or its staff."

Which one of these are just political opinions?

And a private school "banning" a book isn't an actual ban. You could still purchase and read the book if you desired.

But Twitch can't?

Was it wrong for a private school to "ban" a book? I think so... do you?

Do you think it's wrong for twitch to ban people for: "terrorist activities, child sexual exploitation, violent extremism, credible threats of mass violence, carrying out or deliberately acting as an accomplice to sexual assault and threatening Twitch or its staff."?

Banning a book isn't even in the same ball park. I think it's pathetic of the school.

There was an Atari 2600 game that involved rape which was banned in some community on Long Island. That's the only one i can think of.

Indeed. The remedy here is to enforce anti-trust laws.

They're opening the door to threaten influencers making money using their platform that support the "wrong" political party. If they say the wrong thing on Twitter, they will be banned on twitch/fb/google/etc. Incredible times we live in.