You muddle the waters greatly when you pretend it was just some free speech issue (Newsflash: FREE SPEECH DOES NOT EXTEND TO NON-GOVERNMENT ENTITIES),
What happened is a free speech issue. Did the actions Microsoft took promote the healthy and open exchange of ideas or did they take an action in order to silence? Since Gab is largely a closed community this action wasn't so much protecting people from abuse so much as it was preventing like minded people from talking to each other. And no matter what I think about the things they said I still hold that they ought to be allowed to say them among themselves.
Values such as these do not flow from the Government to the people and culture, but from the people and culture to the Government. If the culture is to disregard free speech for certain forbidden opinions, then that will seep into the Government eventually. I fear that if we continue on the path we have been going down for the last few years, we may lose the Freedom of Speech at the Government level in a generation.
And they are. No one is stopping them from talking to each other. They however are telling people to stop talking to each other in the office building Microsoft owns and rents out.
Perhaps that's the best analogy? Providing (P|I|S)AAS is a business transaction. Its like renting out commercial space. And landowners turn down potential leases for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with money ("we're trying to cultivate a certain image in this area"), and we don't bat an eye. We would think absolutely nothing of a landlord saying "no, local KKK chapter, you cannot set up your lounge here".
But when the space is virtual, it magically changes from a landlord to a speech thing. Even though the activities at the KKK lounge would be, by and large, the same kinds of activities that would happen at stormfront, except perhaps overall less harmful (more potlucks, less extremism).
The landlord isn't stopping them from chatting, he just isn't going to be party to a transaction that actively facilitates it. Why's Microsoft (or Google, or anyone else's) action different?
I'm happy to provide thought experiments to test where you actually lie on this debate. I expect that your views will normally fall on the "no one is under any obligation, even ethically, to provide someone else a speech platform, and refusing to provide someone a platform is not the same as censorship", although I can't say for sure.
I think it because whenever there is piracy or unauthorized access to entertainment or information resource from cable/media companies comes up, apart from company whose property get stolen, all seem to have sympathy towards culprit . The standard arguments are couched in user freedom rather than taking someone's property without consent. All this is because resource is digital so my access does not deprive other.
So blocking is claimed to harmful, immoral, greed by media or cable companies for things some people want to have. And now non-blocking is considered harmful by social media companies for things some people do not want.
It's not surprising that people don't treat something that lacks one of the key aspects of property as property. Especially when the desired enforcement regime for this concept always seems to necessitate encroachment on their actual property!
Copyright applied to individuals is even less enforceable than drug persecution. And we see how well that's working out.
Your 'system' is simply unrestricted speech to the powerful and your 'solution' is just a suggestion that Gab's community become powerful enough to speak. Does that sound like free speech to you?
Microsoft should be under no more obligation to enable the spread of hate by hosting it online than a business hosting it in physical space.
In the world we do live in, speech for your small niche community is literally a 30 dollar raspberry pi and an internet connection away. No one has any moral (or legal authority for that matter) to shut down the nazi chat rooms of others (under your views at least); just like Microsoft and others have no moral obligation to host content that breaks their terms of service and will drive others off of their platform.
Arguing what is "right" in a law abiding society is nonsense. If the laws are flawed you argue against the laws, if they aren't pretending that people or groups of people should conform to your ideals is ultimately a waste of time.
We don't allow companies that are monopolies in critical industries to do as they please, in many areas and for many reasons. If there is effectively widespread censorship of speech, who elected Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, et all to be the deciders of what gets censored and what does not? If the ability or potential for that is out there, shouldn't it be the democratically elected government that determines what does and does not get censored and not a cabal of private corporations?
These platforms aren't doing censorship because of some systematic application of content rules. They're doing it as part of an overall ideological battle.
The odiousness of the words in question don't factor into it.
The neoconservative movement, for instance, is accused of faking evidence of WMDs in order to get us into a serious war and causing a massive death toll. That accusation is that their speech was lies in order to get us into war. But they are center-right interventionists, many of whom were liberals before 9/11. Is neoconservatism hate speech?
Pro-life protestors claim that abortions in the US have murdered approximately the population of Spain since Roe v Wade. They also point out that Denmark has eliminated babies born with Down's syndrome. Is the pro-choice position hate speech?
I think a fair minded person can draw a distinction between these things, the point of politics is coexisting with people who aren't particularly fair minded and are going to try and game the system. The idea of free speech is that the simplest way to prevent gaming is not giving them a system to game, especially not one as ambiguous and dangerous as hate speech rules.