The whole debate over free speech and moderation really always just comes down to "what are the rules, who sets them, and enforces them". Everything else is always just instrumental to that question.

All other debates are just special cases of it.

The 1A debates are hyper-legalized proxies for it, either arguing (correctly) that 1A means the rules can't be enforced by the government, or railing against that (usually, but not always based on the expectation the govt would side with your view)

The 230 debates are a (usually poorly informed) hyper-legalized instrumentation to that.

The shadowban/algorithm debates is -- "who sets the algorithm?" as a proxy for "who sets the rules / decides"

But about 99% of all of the different variants of the debates come down to "who sets the rules, and who enforces them".

Note also that nobody serious argues that *nobody* should set the rules or enforce them; even free-speech absolutists don't go that far.

It's just always the question of *who*.

In the olden Twitter days, the answer was "Twitter set the rules, so as to navigate the line between maximizing engagement for advertizers, but also generally (but not always) trying to steer engagement away from hateful content"

The new rules are "maximizing engagement at all costs, with engagement steered away from those who don't pay"

That's all it is.

Anyone who tries to tell you they've solved the problem with This One Cool Trick The Moderators Don't Want You To Know is fooling you, and either trying to take your money, or set *themselves* up as the rule-maker and enforcer, or both.

That's how you get to conclusions like "Elon's Jet twitter account should be visibility restricted, but anti-vaxxers, far-right pundits, and anyone who pays me $8 should not"

There's no philosophical principle behind it beyond the guy in charge setting the rules based on his own interests.

You might think that he *shouldn't*, but the corporate and constitutional structure of America means he *can*, and that's what the site has become, and why it's unlikely to correct course in the future.

@Pwnallthethings it'd be great if we had the sensibility of people from a century or so ago who were more in touch with union members and workers' movements to explain how having everything run by the boss for the boss makes it awful
@enbuenora @Pwnallthethings they only got there after living through the gilded age and the ‘29 crash. Looks like we’re moving in that direction but whether it’ll end New Deal or 3rd Reich remains to be seen.
@MyLittleMetroid @Pwnallthethings In the early 20th century, the news media environment was in many ways better--the majority of subscriptions to newspapers, newsletters, publications were to those published by labor, socialists, agricultural populists, reformers, and ethnic communities. Now the business press entirely dominates formal news media.
@enbuenora @Pwnallthethings it’s never the same but it often rhymes. It’s also not like the newspaper barons of yesteryear were any better than Murdoch et al. The escape valves were different though and they aren’t working for much of the populace nowadays but I suspect they didn’t back then either.
@MyLittleMetroid no, the business press was just as bad back then--but there was a more widespread balance to it not based in the business press