Run the service as if it was bound by the First Amendment (i.e. only illegal content should be removed, basically how every social network ran prior to a few years ago.)
No large social network ever ran that way and I'm skeptical that any social network could be run that way and make a profit. Here are some of the things that are not actually illegal to publish under US law:
- Most forms of doxxing
- Adult nudity and pornography
- Most gore images and videos (industrial accidents, car crashes, corpses from war zones (including children), animal abuse...)
- Praise and promotional material for pedophilia
- Praise and encouragement for anorexia and other eating disorders
- Promotional material and instructions for suicide
- Praise and promotional material for terrorist groups like ISIS, as long as it doesn't call for "imminent lawless action." Much historically banned-by-bigtech ISIS propaganda was not actually illegal, which is why government officials urged companies to do something about it instead of just dispatching law enforcement.
- Spam that isn't delivered via email
- Coordinated foreign propaganda, e.g. "50 Cent Party" commenters piling on to criticize anyone who criticizes mainland China's government
- Jailbait images (in the sense of the banned-in-2011 subreddit r/jailbait)
A lot of things that 95% of Americans never want to see online are actually legal, just so widely reviled and moderated against that you rarely encounter them accidentally.
And many of these exceptions might not even necessarily even be exceptions to US law or the First Amendment. Abuse of computer systems (spam), Federal obscenity laws, etc.
And there are many potential approaches to hiding (with transparency) from view legal content that no one (or almost no one) actually wants to see, without necessarily even deleting it.
One obvious approach would be to allow users to dictate what kinds of content they want to see. An example is subreddits, where users who want to see gore could be free to do so. Twitter could implement similar kinds of self-moderation features.
There are probably even more creative approaches that could solve some of the echo chamber effects, misinformation, etc without heavy-handed global moderation. It's a hard problem but it'd be really great to see someone try at least.
." Run the service as if it was bound by the First Amendment (i.e. only illegal content should be removed, basically how every social network ran prior to a few years ago.)"
Hate speech is legal
