Without moderation, we can't have an internet. I think a lot of people that haven't been involved in moderation don't really understand how important it is. I'm not talking about controlling people's opinions or censoring lots of viewpoints. Even algorithmically controlled things aren't just dumb pipes.

Is anti-spam, anti-gaming censorship? HN doesn't let you downvote comments until you have a certain number of points. HN works to make voting rings ineffective. Both of these involve judgments. Are those two votes independent? Maybe they are independent votes and you (or your software) has decided they aren't independent and you've taken away their voting power and censored their input. Nobody wants that. However, the alternative is that someone will just create millions of bots and then the site loses all relevance.

A common carrier is generally a company that will deliver something from one person to another person without discrimination. For example, AT&T takes your packet and delivers it to its destination. These websites are made to show things to people that it wasn't explicitly sent to. Do we compel sites to display everything posted to everyone? That would be impossible. Some content is spam and other content is simply unpopular. The usual response to this is that it would be ok to prioritize popular content - but only along the lines of rigid rules. However, everyone kinda recognizes Goodhart's Law - that every measure which becomes a target becomes a bad measure.

What is legal communication? Is this any communication that a court hasn't convicted someone for saying? That would mean that they couldn't remove communication that's clearly illegal because there's always a chance that a court might disagree. That basically means that your site is going to become a cesspool. We've seen these cesspools on the internet. They're not places you want to go. Heck, you're here on HN because the moderation is generally good.

I think what some people miss is that a lot of "censorship" is shutting down harassment, stalking, incitement to terrorism, etc. Sometimes it gets couched in ways where someone kinda denies that's their intent. "This person is a sicko. They must understand that thousands of people are going to harass them for this," knowing that their followers will then harass them since the poster pointed them out. Oh, they weren't inciting harassment, they were just noting it would happen to their followers who harass them. Maybe the answer is that law enforcement needs to put people in prison for these illegal acts of harassment, stalking, and terror. For example, Boston Children's Hospital has received many bmb threats lately. I'm sure that many sites have removed posts calling for people to threaten the hospital. Maybe the answer is that everyone who has posted something calling for threats against the hospital should get a few years in prison and a 6 or 7 figure fine rather than having their posts censored.

This would somewhat eliminate the ability of websites to have a niche. If I have a subreddit about cats and you decide that you want to spam dogs onto it, am I a common carrier that must allow any speech on my subreddit? Maybe you'll say that's ok, but that reddit in general couldn't prevent a dog subreddit. Ok, but what if my site is an independent site and not a subreddit. Then am I a common carrier?

With a common carrier, you're usually paying the carrier to deliver things for you. With social sites, you're usually getting to use them for free. As a social site, am I required to take your content, store, and deliver it for free even if I determine that your content won't make me money? In fact, almost everyone does* want common carriers to censor speech - find me a person who doesn't hate the SPAM texts and calls. Oh, I get it - but that's different. Common carriers are likely to limit people when their behavior becomes problematic. With someone like the USPS, that will happen because the usage charges are high enough to deter a lot of problematic usage. With someone like a telco, they might notice patterns of abuse and start filtering messages.

I'd say it's also odd that we're focusing on these social sites and their moderation without talking about email. I can't just install postfix and start sending to Gmail without hitting the SPAM folder (or potentially not getting delivered at all). We've been living with this issue for decades and it's a little odd that they're going after YouTube, Facebook, etc. when out inboxes have been filtered for a while. I'm not saying that your inbox is a common carrier, but it feels closer than YouTube or Twitter.

I think that what makes it hard is that there's a fine line between political speech and incitement to terrorism. If I say, "X is horrible and if the government doesn't do something about it, people will take justice into their own hands," is that an incitement to violence? Maybe I know that my followers just need to be pointed at a target with an implication that they should attack it (without me saying it so that I can deny it later). For people who go around generally not having to worry about being a victim of that, it doesn't feel like something at the forefront of the issue. For most people, the worry about having a post moderated is much more likely than the worry that someone will dox them, SWAT them, and harass them to the point that they can't live their life. Again, you'll say that those things are illegal, but unless we're prepared to put our law enforcement resources in that direction and put real consequences behind that, it's going to present a real problem for our society. And I don't think our society is ready to accept a lot of people (disproportionately white, male, and more upper-middle-class) getting charged with crimes for stuff like this.

We're seeing that with the January 6th terrorists. They tried to overthrow the US government and are now complaining that they can't go to a renaissance faire. The penalties so far have been pretty light for people whose crimes were so severe. I think almost all of the people being investigated and charged probably wish they hadn't been able to make it into the Capitol and therefore wouldn't be facing consequences now - and I think that most people on these social sites would rather complain about their posts getting moderated than have those posts handed over to law enforcement for serious criminal charges.

What makes this all feel in bad faith is that the Texas law is coming from the same group of people that are actively trying to censor everything. They're trying to ban books from schools. They're trying to restrict information around abortion and transgender issues. They're trying to censor information correctly stating that the Civil War was fought over slavery. The F-Your-Feelings group is screaming "BUT MY FEELINGS!" The "I should be allowed to discriminate however I want" group is screaming "HOW DARE THEY DISCRIMINATE AGAINST ME!"

Should I be allowed to come into your store, harass your customers, scream my political views, and then tell you that you can't kick me out? No. The same is true of sites online. It's a tragedy that we've centralized the internet so much that a few companies have so much power, but the fact is that almost every site would decide to moderate things in a similar fashion - just as almost every store would kick you out for harassing their customers and screaming stuff in their store. People don't generally want to visit a place that's full of garbage. Heck, people here complain that Amazon doesn't moderate their listings enough and there's too much garbage there. The second that things are a free-for-all, the same people that complain about censorship then complain about the garbage. Amazon isn't close to a free-for-all and everyone complains that they can't trust anything - from fake reviews to fake products to whatever. People complain about Yelp all the time - from fake reviews to Yelp censoring their genuine review which got presumed as spam.

Nobody wants to be in an unmoderated cesspool. Sometimes sites are small and people are good. When you become the size of Twitter or YouTube or Reddit, you just get a certain amount of garbage that makes your site not fun for 99.999% of the people who are trying to enjoy it. Do you want to see your investment die under a barrage of garbage or do you want to remove the problematic stuff? Even as people complain about Amazon, I'm sure Amazon is removing so much stuff from their site to try and keep it good enough that people are mostly happy. No one wants Gmail to remove SPAM filters. Ultimately, as much as people complain, they don't want to be allowed to do anything they want and face the consequences.

Yes, sometimes sites get things wrong in their moderation. I'm sure Amazon removes legitimate products, Yelp removes legitimate reviews, and a Twitter moderator who maybe has 30 seconds to determine if a post is harassment hits the "yes" button when it's just political speech sometimes. However, the alternative would be living with an Amazon that would be unusable, living with a Twitter no one would ever open, and living with Gmail that would be a deluge of SPAM.