So, yeah, many of us get a bit worked up when people are kicked off platforms, because they are being silenced, sometimes to the point of being shut out of the modern internet entirely (when their rights to a DNS address are comprehensively removed).
Hate speech and lies are terrible, but they’re not the only thing being silenced.
If twitter/facebook is allowed to serve as a primary means for an government organisation/department to serve as the primary way which it communicate it's not to hard to argue that that line have been crossed where it have to act as an "open access" common carirer, from an pragmatic real world stand point.
Putting an purely technical definition as the core of this debate is arguing over how many angels can fit on an pin needle, and not of any real value for deciding what kind of society we want.
Twitter et al. are where modern speech happens. They pushed themselves into this position, and thus upholding the human right to free speech also falls upon them.
So long as Twitter is not shut down, then perhaps some government oversight (to the limit of holding Twitter responsible for what and who they censor) is appropriate.
Free speech, in this case, trumps my intense dislike of our current administration.
Why is it bad that were refusing to let something like stormfront operate in polite society? Your free speech absolutism is dangerous.
You can't debate an inherently bad-faith interlocutor, so dealing with Nazis points "out in the open," "in the marketplace of ideas," will not work. It will only legitimize their viewpoint as one worthy of consideration, thus debate. It's cool and good what happened to them.
The problem is this tactic is consistently agaisnt many dissident publications, often on pro-democratic ones by autocratic countries. So what/where do you draw the line for "this speech is unacceptable so we won't propagate DNS entries for it", and who draws it? USA? ICANN? The host country? Each DNS gets to pick and choose?
Going in the other direction, if this speech is so bad, why don't ISP's just ban the IP? We could do like Youtube automated takedowns, only it's a packet blackhole.
At the expense of pushing the satire, what we really need is Deep Packet Free Speech Inspection (tm). All packets are inspected by a blockchain-powered AI in the cloud for acceptibility and lack of Nazi content. All servers which respond to HTTPS must escrow TLS keys to enable Freedom Audits.
If allowing an operator to have DNS records or an IP address "legitimizes" them, then we need some full-blown worldwide consortium which determines the (il)legitimacy of each and every domain. Who has votes in this consortium? What if China wants to put the kabash on some Uyghurs because of "Terrorism" but Netherlands want to keep it up. Sounds like a beaurocratic nightmare.
Although virtually none do so in unrestricted fashion. Hate speech, racism, genocide denial and so on aren't protected by free-speech in the overwhelming amount of legislations even in countries with a liberal tradition, and just like any other right free speech is subject to limitations.
