The same way a store can't kick someone out who's running around saying racial slurs to everyone?

The same way the New York Times is required to print every letter to the editor that is sent to them?

The store example doesn't hold up at all for a number of reasons and online communities have had extra legal standards since the beginning of the internet.

They can't kick out whoever they want, governments regulate that. And here Germany decided that Youtube can't kick out people for a particular reason. It is the same concept.

They can but not because the store has negative opinion about this behavior but because that behaving disorderly in public place is against the law. Actually they should just call the cops.

In America at least, there are different sets of rules for different types of business.

A curated opinion piece, carefully chosen by experienced editors, is vastly different from a public swimming pool. For the first, that filter, that exclusivity, that editorializing is part of the draw. It’s good because it’s a filter, not a platform. The public pool should not be a filter, and yes, sometimes there are weird things that float in there, and it takes effort to clean up, but that’s the cost of being open to the public.

Why?

> Same way that when you open a store you can't pick and choose your customers.

Of course you can, you just can't refuse service based on legally protected classes, that's the exception not the rule.

> Platforms should just obey law and at most create a process where users and lawmakers can express and enforce their opinion on content.

Platforms should operate their sites however they like within the confines of the law and individual users can decide which sites they prefer to use based on how those sites operate.

> Why?

Because if it has that right it should have the full responsibility for everything it publishes. With no leeway.

>> Same way that when you open a store you can't pick and choose your customers.

> Of course you can, you just can't refuse service based on legally protected classes, that's the exception not the rule.

Depends on the local law. For example in Poland if you have a store and you put up some good for sale and mark it with a price, you can't refuse it to sell it to anyone that is willing to pay that price. No special classes, just a simple rule. If you are selling, you are selling.

> Platforms should operate their sites however they like within the confines of the law and individual users can decide which sites they prefer to use based on how those sites operate.

Right, and the law should say that they can't have an opinion about the content they publish, and they can't take down or promote stuff based on that opinion.

I don't understand your reasoning. When you say "full responsibility" I assume you mean legal responsibility, as in, a website that removes posts by users should take full legal responsibility if users post illegal content, but I don't see the connection between the two ideas, the illegal content was still posted by a user, what about removing posts makes the website now legally responsible for the actions of users. This would also make the site legally impossible to operate, it sounds like you're suggesting any site that removes user content should be pushed into shutting down. Am I misunderstanding?

If a platform decides to pick and choose then it's no longer a platform. It's a publisher.

It's not the users that post illegal content. Users only send it privately to the publisher and publishers decides to make it publicly available and should bear full legal and moral responsibility for the act of publishing it.

The whole invention of a term platform is so that tech companies can avoid responsibility of publishers.

> it sounds like you're suggesting any site that removes user content should be pushed into shutting down

It can remove user submitted content but only if the laws requires for such content to be removed or if there are technical reasons to do that (content is too large, to popular, too unpopular, some time have passed, etc).

This isn't true though, the distinction you're making doesn't exist, it's still obviously a platform as well as a publisher.

> Users only send it privately to the publisher and publishers decides to make it publicly available

That's not how it works though. Users are free to upload anything they want to the platform and it's published automatically, if it is later determined to be illegal or otherwise in violation of the guidelines, standards or relevance, then it is removed.

> The whole invention of a term platform is so that tech companies can avoid responsibility of publishers.

There is no legal meaning to these words, they are merely a functional description of how these sites work and they are obviously both platforms and publishers.

> It can remove user submitted content but only if the laws requires for such content to be removed or if there are technical reasons to do that (content is too large, to popular, too unpopular, some time have passed, etc)

I understand that this is your stated position of how things ought to work, but I still don't see a reason why it should work this way, sites being able to remove content is useful for moderation and curation which are features that users like and want.

In America, you can, as long as it is not based on a protected class. The "burden of proof" (either "beyond a reasonable double" for criminal or "a preponderance of evidence" in civil) is not on the business, but on the rejected customer.

Further, as this is talking about content that they are required to host, rather than restricting who is viewing a video, a more accurate analogy is a store picking their distributors. Which they obviously do.

Which is generally a thing left up to the store owner and not the government.

YouTube has a product they sell, advertising slots embedded in videos. YouTube's customer is the person buying the ad slot. The video and uploader are, in a tortured analogy I didn't choose about YouTube being a small store, the product that YouTube sells to their actual customer, the advertiser.

Bringing up whitelists and blacklists doesn't change that.

Youtube and facebook are natural monopolies due to their network effect.

All the older natural monopolies, water networks, electricity networks, landline phone networks, railroad networks, and the rest of them are either nationalized, or regulated heavily.

It's long overdue to add social networks to the list.

Their monopoly is their social network. People want to publish video where the audience is, the global audience happen to be on youtube, and going to stay there because that's where most videos are.

The idea that we shouldn't do such things because government could be used to impose horrible things is a bad one. Driving a car could kill you, but you wouldn't ban cars for that reason because cars are not bad in principle nor are they so dangerous that they should be banned. They are regulated, however, and this is good.

But you can mostly pick and choose your customers outside of discriminating against a protect class (in the US). If you don't want to do business with people with brown hair, no one is stopping you.

Yes, but this is about Germany and not US, and (AFAIK) consumer protection laws in Europe generally prohibit stores to pick and choose customers arbitrarily.

"genetic information" is a protected class, so you could not discriminate against anyone based on their natural hair color. You could however ban people with blue hair.

edit: Even if genetic information doesn't work for hair color. "Color" is already a protected class, so it's a moot point.

There’s a carve out of protections against discriminating based on membership in a protected class, but you can totally decide to get up one day and not provide service to anyone whose ever worn a hat for instance