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I guess my stumbling block is that I don't think widespread adoption or reach is necessary for free speech to flourish.
Elijah Parish Lovejoy's abolitionist pamphlets almost certainly had less reach than big city, mainstream newspapers of the time. He probably had a short list of subscribers who shared around his pamphlets when they were done reading them.
How are people, Left or Right, who complain about not being allowed on a given platform, not doing the equivalent of Lovejoy hypothetically complaining, "The big city newspapers should be forced by law to have a column written by me about abolition, so I can have the maximum reach possible!"
Free speech does nothing to guarantee reach. You have free speech if you're allowed to run a dinky WordPress site off of a Raspberry Pi, or hand out your pamphlets on the street corner.
If the big city newspaper doesn't want to run an article you wrote advocating your political position, or a large social media site would ban you for saying certain things, this has no larger implications for free speech, as long as there are other venues where you can say those things.
I just feel like people are being lazy when they insist that the large social media sites must carry their opinion. Like, yes I too would prefer to say my piece on Facebook instead of actually doing the hard work of printing out pamphlets and distributing them at train stations like a Jehovah's Witness. But the fact that you're unwilling to do the latter thing in advancement of your political goals just shows you are a coward and a hypocrite on top of being lazy, not that you have actually had any free speech rights denied in any meaningful sense.
Elijah Lovejoy replaced his vandalized printing press two times, and died for his beliefs. What have you done recently?
Ok, but are big city newspaper held responsible for the content they publish?
Social media sites are not, they are considered, in the jurisdiction that matters (US), protected by Section 230 as utilities are. Someone can say something completely illegal on Facebook and Facebook does not get in trouble. The reason why social media sites are given this protection is because forcing them to moderate content would have been, when the decision was made technically difficult , and out of concern that it would have a chilling effect on lawful speech.
Now since then they have demonstrated that they are both able to moderate, and also moderate in a way that chills some lawful speech, why do they need or deserve this protection? Of course, stripping them of this protection will make them very vulnerable to lawsuits, which they will probably want to avoid. So it's likely they will change their moderation policies (reducing the amount or kind of speech that is moderated) to maintain the protections.
I think this is a silly statement. Any platform worth being on will moderate some lawful speech, no matter how big or small.
I wouldn't join a Facebook parent's group if it was 90% spam ads for children's toys that I don't need. I wouldn't go to /r/DnD if it was 95% low effort AI slop. I wouldn't go to the Motte if they didn't moderate for tone.
All of the content in those three examples is perfectly legal, and I don't want to see any of it. Or if I do want to see it, I want it on a dedicated place.
I don't actually think there is a principled argument that could separate that necessary function of making any online space worth going to, and possibly restricting certain kinds of legal speech.
If you want to change the law and make the companies subject to suing and litigation, fine. But it is awfully silly to do it because they restrict lawful speech, because they all have to restrict lawful speech in some way.
Also, I think you're just not thinking about the second and third order effects of changing this. In your ideal world, do you think the Motte being subject to suing based on what its users post would make it a better or worse platform for discussion than it currently is?
I can see several ways around this. First would be technical moderation being considered different; it could either for messages that don't qualify as they are of a nature that inherently impede effective communication (ie: spam), or speech that is deemed off-topic. Then there's also distinctions that could be made between platforms that aim to service "specific communities" or are meant for "everyone". Facebook and Twitter at large, ignoring specific Facebook groups, are marketing themselves as social media for everyone. Then from there you could distiguish that hte platform is Facebook, or Reddit, not /r/DnD, and so while /r/DnD could enjoy the moderation they want, Reddit could not without risking their Section 230 protection ban someone from making /r/DnDAISlop.
Ultimately, beneficial moderation is likely to become irrelevant and unnecessary as AI will enable bespoke filtering of content. Whether it will be good or bad for humanity with regards to our already strong filter bubbles I'm not sure, but I think it's inevitable at this point.
I'm not sure the sites actually want to be for everyone, though. Reddit admin eliminated /r/CreepShots, because they didn't want to deal with the bad publicity of their website encouraging people to take candid photos of women out in public. Even if we assume a world where they could limit /r/CreepShots to such jurisdictions where taking photos of strangers in public without their permission was legal, do you think that Reddit's section 230 protection should be contingent upon Reddit admin allowing /r/CreepShots to exist whether they want it to or not?
Should Reddit have been forced to keep up /r/jailbait, which was "just" provocative images of fully clothed teenage girls?
Should Tumblr have been forbidden from banning porn from their platform back in 2019? Or is your expectation that all of social media should basically be a porn free for all, if sites want to keep their section 230 protections?
I just think that platform owners will legitimately have visions for how they would like their platforms to be used. And there will obvious, easy to put into writing criteria, like, "We don't want spam on this site", and there will be more nebulous, vibes based things like, "We don't want anything that would make it hard for advertisers to advertise on our site", or "We don't want anything that will reduce shareholder price or affect our brand image", and I personally think those are legitimate concerns for platforms to consider. They need to make money to keep operating, and I'm not sure the government forcing them to become common carriers will actually be the best way to keep these large sites operating in the long term.
Don't get me wrong, I find it extremely frustrating when run of the mill monetary concerns diminish a site I enjoy. I remember when TV Tropes Wiki had to disallow certain kinds of adult tropes and content, because the advertisers the site needed to stay afloat wouldn't advertise if those pages existed. But should TV Tropes Wiki really have been forced to choose between A) having the advertising revenue they needed to stay afloat but opening themselves up to being sued due to losing section 230 protections, or B) having to shut down the site because they couldn't find advertisers willing to advertise on their platform?
Heck, even if you want to argue that in a social-media-as-common-carrier world, everything will work out, and advertisers will make deals to only be shown on certain subreddits and never on others, do you really think platforms will want to devote database space, server cost, etc. to subreddits or accounts they can never get advertising revenue off of? They'll ban them for some other pretense, because who wants to be forced to have 10 Pentabytes of creepshots and jailbait photos that you can't even make any advertising money off of taking up space on your platform?
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