I'm not talking about speech without consequences, I'm talking about how online plattforms systematically cooperate with certain NGOs to police and suppress speech on topics which the west considers problematic.
Online platforms don't have to host any content they don't want to. The difference is that in the west you can make your own platform whenever you want - in China you can't.
Increasingly, the west has been using the very infrastructure of the internet to censor speech actually. So that argument doesn't hold. Where do you think we will be in 10 years? Do you think this trend is just temporary?
Will someone earnestly say "Just build your own telecommunications system!"?
Either way, it's actually a moot point, and I concede that infrastructure based censorship is extremely rare, but the "canaries" in the coal mine have indeed died, and people should be paying attention. See the EFF statement quite recently.
The real point is that if the public square is on the internet, which it is, then speech must be guaranteed on the internet, just as well as it is guaranteed in public squares in any town. It raises a terribly complex question, of who should regulate the internet to guarantee speech. In some countries like Germany, speech is quite heavily restricted compared to the US.
All major social media sites are natural monopolies, which will not break. If you are deplatformed, you are silenced. The internet grew to be something it wasn't envisioned to be, and our societies have not kept up, mostly because the western establishment actually enjoys the censorship which is provided by the private mega-corporations.
Yes it does. I can find extremist beliefs on the first page of a google search right now that would be censored if the foundation of your argument was correct, but it demonstrably isn't.
