> What's legal or illegal evolves with politics and culture. So there's no fundamental purchase there for the kind of moral conversation you were trying to elicit. If in a few years the people you accuse of wanting to control other people's speech are able to get some laws passed making the speech they want controlled properly illegal, I'd venture you would resist accepting that as suddenly legitimate - even if those things would be "straight up illegal" at that point.

The parent commenter was simply saying that the abhorrent examples you provided were not a point of contention, and not relevant to a conversation about free speech. They weren't attempting to put the word of the law onto a pedestal as you seem to suggest, they were simply pointing out that the things you mentioned are universally considered bad all around the planet, whereas freedom of speech is not.

The situation you've outlined in which one political party successfully silences their opponents through legal means is exactly why a "Site deciding this or that political view is now bad" is so dangerous.

If you don't see distinction between posting pedophilia/beheadings and different political views that's entirely you problem.

"We don't allow what law doesn't allow, and moderate what is considering explicit by default, but you can opt out of that" I think is entirely fine line for platform to stand on. Anything above that is them fucking around with public opinion for their benefits.

>The wanker at the twitter office that was presumably appointed by twitter management to do that, yes? And some people want to appeal to that particular seat of power to influence and limit discourse along some dimension, within twitter.

> And yet other appeals to higher powers, such as governments - control communication with deeper consequences across broader domains.

Government is supposed to work toward interest of its people, not corporations, that's the difference here. And, well, the government is only entity that can tell corporation to behave. You can just not vote in the wankers to the office too.

Government (in first world countries) will only tell you to stop once you actually start to incite violence, not when you post some wrongthink on social media (except UK I guess...).

Are there governments worse than corporations ? Sure, but corpos can just not participate in their market. They will, for the money, and that's all there is to say about corporate goals.

> What's legal or illegal evolves with politics and culture. So there's no fundamental purchase there for the kind of moral conversation you were trying to elicit.

Sure, slavery was legal at some point. Doesn't really matter. That's not the point.

The point here that you are desperately trying to miss is that corporation should not have power to manipulate public opinion at will, because only target for corporation is to earn more money

And you can tell government to change the laws, that's how we got slavery banned, women getting rights to vote and minorities being not repressed. Can't do that to corporation. Of course you need to want government act in benefit of its people which US have hard time doing (the stuff your "lobbyists" are doing would get them arrested in EU...) but even that skewed system is still better than Zuck or Elon or other clown deciding what people should see or not see.