Yeah, examples like Nazi websites and child porn are easy, we all pretty much agree that these things are beyond the pale. It's more the stuff like ex-Muslim activists getting their pages pulled down through reporting campaigns, or someone like Stephen Knight getting repeatedly banned from twitter, that you get into grey areas about the degree of control private enterprises currently have over the dissemination of information and the communication of ideas.
There's an inherent tension between the desire to let businesses decide for themselves how to run their platforms and let the market decide what impact those decisions have, and not wanting those businesses to be able to effectively shape the zeitgeist to their whims. That tension isn't really central to our concerns here, because Nazis. But it's probably worth dealing with at some other time in some other context.
__________________
"The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
|