> Always mentally translate "create a website that allows free speech" into "create a website that forces others to always pay for undesirable speech they don't agree with" -- and you will see that's a virtually impossible dream to accomplish. There is no broadcasting medium (including websites) in any country that doesn't have interference and pressure to remove/ban content via consumer boycotts, advertisers, subscribers, business judgement, or government officials.

> Websites have the hard reality of requiring cpu/disk/bandwidth and they all cost money and that's the lever used by others that keeps "absolute free speech" from getting realistically implemented.

There seems to be a blind spot here in the idea that "websites" have to be big monolithic platforms that give everyone a megaphone.

"Websites" where you can say whatever you want are and have been cheap, and there have been famous examples of this for decades (Timecube!).

But expecting to get access to someone else's megaphone is a very different question. Recently it's been mediated by "engagement" which is a socially terrible base metric, editorially - it encourages the most ridiculous, provocative thing. But this is still a choice, not just some technological inevitability or "correct" ideal state. Big platforms will always necessarily do some sort of curation.

Putting the government in charge of that curation seems silly, since the real cost of bypassing the platforms is so low. Yeah, you have to earn the eyeballs then, instead of piggybacking on other people's shit, but is that so bad?

It's like saying "people shouldn't make independent movies anymore, we're just gonna have the government review all the scripts the big studios take on and make them take some they normally wouldn't."