> Also, how free speech are those venues in the early internet? Were they literally "as long as it's legal we'll let you post it"? The most absolutely illegal

> Also, how free speech are those venues in the early internet? Were they literally "as long as it's legal we'll let you post it"? The most absolutely illegal stuff was posted. And often as not where one would expect ordinary porn. It was well beyond Wild West, and much more depraved Epstein rape island. It took quite a few years for reliably legal porn newsgroups to become a thing, and even longer to weed out the criminal image and video groups… if they even did; the web took off before Usenet solved its criminal porn problems. Anything you can imagine and worse was available on the early Usenet. Absolutely nothing was being done to regulate it.