>When the companies are generating revenue through selling advertisements, and the advertisers decide "yeah we actually don't want to buy a pre-roll on the stream where the guy is making racist comments", it's another level of difficulty to navigate. Should these companies be required to host someone's content at a loss, given that they have some way for advertisers to "block" certain content types from being associated with their brands?

It is simple enough to add flags to streams that enough people report as "offensive" and let advertisers choose which streams their advertisements appear on. Advertisers (and others) who insist that everyone that find offensive is completely banned off the platform should be given the bird and told to take a walk. I think one of the problems is that advertising has (like big tech) become an oligopoly, dominated by "the big four" ad agencies. It is one thing for a company that represents .001% of the ad market to pull their ads from a website or a platform because they find something offensive, and a massive conglomerate to pull 25% of all ads from a platform (let alone act in concert with the other 3 ad agencies who control the entire ad market). The reality is that far too many of our "markets" are controlled by far too many corporations, many of which act in concert and otherwise coordinate in ways that are legally questionable, at best. Unfortunately due to our largely corrupt government that is heavily influenced by corporate interests and regulatory agencies that are mostly staffed by a revolving door of industry cronies things are very unlikely to change.

It's slightly different in that those are basically utility companies at this point, but there's definitely an argument to be made that certain levels of social media ubiquity ought to qualify them as a utility, since you lose so much through not being able to interact with them.