>That's not the correct usage of dog whistle.

Close enough.

>Oh, so you are now magically in favor of 230?

I'm saying you can't not be an editor yet do editorial things at the same time.

>If people should have some discretion, then why should I, a private social media company, be forced to provide bandwidth and data for speech I don't agree with?

There are multiple problems with this. For one, the government has been asking "private" companies to take stuff down. The act of asking alone is a form of intimidation. Secondly, even private companies can be public commons. The sheer scale of social media and the way that different sites seemingly coordinate to ban people they don't like (often in tandem with the government) is a threat to free speech.

>Why is it fine that I can withhold icing from homosexuals, but I can't withhold database rows from racists?

Because democracy and critical individual rights do not rely on being able to get cake from a particular person or company? There's no conspiracy among bakers to deprive these people of cake, after all. This is a prime example of fishing for lawsuits. It's not about the cake, it's about deliberately disrespecting and offending one guy to the point where he would risk losing money in a lawsuit to fight them off.

Just as your employer cannot compel speech just because they pay you, the customer of a baker should not be able to compel speech from him either. In both cases, the employed person should be able to refuse work.

Here's another example: Should a printer be able to refuse to print some booklets he disagrees with? I'm sure he does not have to. The cake thing is very much like that.

>Using X as an example is a poor choice.

I didn't say it was an example of shining free speech. I said it was an example of government censorship exposed to the world. I know X is not perfect but it is freer than practically any other social media right now.

>Elon Musk is not a champion of free speech, and he regularly amplifies conservative voices. Also, the incidence on of the n-word on Twitter went up, like, an order of magnitude under his rule.

First of all, X is much freer than it has been in a long time. I know it isn't perfect but you won't find anything on that scale that is remotely as permissive for free speech. I don't think Musk is excessively promoting conservatives, despite sponsoring them in politics. Liberals simply forgot that many conservatives even existed because they were all strategically purged from the old Twitter, an action which goes against Western liberal values of free speech.

Conservatives generally aren't racist, but that is the trope that the leftists have put forward about them. If you look for it you will find many instances of racism against every race online. Racist comments against white people (and sometimes against Asian people) are allowed on Twitter and every other social media platform. In most cases women are given carte blanche to defame and demonize men in general and in particular. The only thing that has changed with X now is people aren't being banned for most legal speech. As I said, X isn't a perfect fountain of free speech but it is at least much better than it was.

>I don't want to see the n-word on Twitter. I don't want to see tweets of scummy men threatening to rape women. Do you? Probably not. X then is an example of what NOT to do.

I don't especially enjoy seeing scummy posts either. But threats are legally actionable speech and do get taken down off of X. As for offensive things, I'm sure we all have opinions that offend someone. Free speech with all the mistakes and friction that it entails is what led our civilization to where it is. In a marketplace of ideas, the best ideas win. But if you put your thumb on the scales and gaslight everyone, eventually that will lead to huge problems.

It may come as a shock to you but the N-word was not always this absurdly charged third rail. People used to say it all the time regardless of their race. Everyone went from thinking it was slightly profane to so awful that any black person in earshot has the license to kill the speaker if they happen to be white. I am only slightly exaggerating. People are now getting in trouble for talking about the word itself. One professor got fired for simply pointing out that there was a Chinese word that sounded almost the same.

I wouldn't be opposed to some kind of filtering mode, like a "safe search" or "parental filter" that can easily be turned off, just to satisfy people like yourself. I'm not a kid or a thin-skinned adult so I want it off. People died fighting to create a system that gives us the right to say what's on our mind. Don't take that for granted.