The issue is combining anonymity with a speech platform. Newspapers published (publish?) Letters to the Editor. Readers sent in their comments on stories the p

The issue is combining anonymity with a speech platform. Newspapers published (publish?) Letters to the Editor. Readers sent in their comments on stories the paper had published. The editor would pick and choose which to publish (editorial discretion). But, a) they did not edit the writer's content, and b) the writer's name and town were published along with their opinion. Once you've made the comments anonymous, you eliminate the restraint that your name confers on your public expression. Should an editor publish a pro-Nazi letter from a reader along with their name, the subscribers all then know that so-and-so is pro-Nazi, and so-and-so will have real-life social consequences, not to mention a new folder in FBI filing cabinets. As long as a commercial platform allows anonymous content contribution, they need to be able to censor what is published. Otherwise, they likely cannot build a business. The place to go with regulation is requiring the platform to be transparent about their censorship rules, and provide means to adjudicate their rulings. In general, corporations are required to develop internal operating policies with fairly wide latitude, and as long as they publish and abide by those policies, they stay out of trouble. This is done in accounting & Finance, HR, and other areas. This approach can be applied to user posts as well. Adjudication should entail whether the reason for censoring holds up to the then-published site rules. Platforms need to publish their rules in entirety, and when a post is squelched or blocked, respond to the poster with chapter and verse of the rules that were violated. This happens to a large extent now, though many find the application to be inconsistent, hence the need for adjudication. Kind of like how HN does it :-)