> If I want to post my thoughts on my own space on the internet I can still throw up a website. That's good! But can you really? Didn’t websites catering to u

> If I want to post my thoughts on my own space on the internet I can still throw up a website. That's good! But can you really? Didn’t websites catering to ultra right wing content get removed from the internet, because no web host would host then? I specifically remember AWS and others refused to continue hosting a fairly major right wing forum a year or two ago, although I don’t remember the details. Payment processors pressure platforms (see OnlyFans), and the government pressures platforms (look at the Facebook hearings). Even if you host your own website on your own physical machine, your IP might get blocked in Chrome and various other website blocklists (1). The internet involves so many commercial parties, at what point do you draw the line and say that actually, everything is a platform, so maybe we need to figure out a way to enshrine free speech on platforms rather than the easy argument of “it’s not censorship if it’s a third-party company”? How do you protect free speech online when there is literally no way to speak on the internet without involving some sort of 3rd party that might decide to block you? (1. Just like email spam block lists, hosting your own website on a IP block that doesn’t normally host websites means you deal with all sorts of safety warning issues. I used to host the website for a community theater but I would get customer support issues where people couldn’t buy tickets because somehow we wound up on a block list as a suspicious website. I coded the website myself in basic static HTML, there was no newfangled React server or JavaScript or anything that could have been infected. No matter how many support tickets I lodged with the company that maintained the blocklist, I couldn’t get removed from the blocklist or get any explanation. Now it’s hosted on Digital Ocean. But if it had been something controversial that I couldn’t just throw up on a third-party hosting platform, I would’ve been out of luck.)