When the subject is censorship in the United States, the First Amendment is going to come up! It's what underlies private parties' ability to control what they

When the subject is censorship in the United States, the First Amendment is going to come up! It's what underlies private parties' ability to control what they publish, rather than follow dictates from the government. Great-grandparent mentions laws. As for other networks, I've used several that aren't big household names. They work fine. Some actually do "social" better, in my opinion. Some boast self-hosting and censorship-resistant features. None of them are popular. But many are cheap enough to run more or less indefinitely, given their small size. I think "just build your own" is a perfectly valid response, since nobody's entitled to any of what a platform represents. If you send a newspaper an editorial and they refuse it, "start your own publication" or "print it up as a pamphlet" are just fine. So is just "no", without any free tips on next steps or alternatives. Nothing is owed. Nothing's delivered. Back to the laws, there are others to keep in mind here. Not just as they sit on the books, but how they play out in practice. Nobody wants to be dealing with subpoenas, court orders, and lawsuits, even lawsuits they can probably get dismissed early on under 230, all the time. Nobody wants to be dealing with media scandals. That's what happens when crime starts happening on your servers. The costs are so high, and involvement so unpleasant, that most experienced operators tune their terms, policies, and algorithms to sweep very broadly, accepting a lot of false positives to avoid false negatives that eat up all their money and time. From a certain point of view, I'm sure it seems Facebook and especially Twitter are seizing on illegality as a pretense for political ends. Taking that was a factor as a given, there's almost certainly some additional element of simple self-defense and cost-saving at work here. Even if you start a new platform that doesn't share their presumed political bias, the other factors will stay in play. Unwillingness to face that explains many of the woes of specifically right-allied platforms in the last ten years. If you set yourself as "the alternative" for people the major platforms are happy to be rid of, you can end up with a user base with a really high percentage of people creating problems that are problems no matter what your politics happen to be.