> On the other hand, I don't see why I, as a platform, should host content I find objectionable.

So you shouldn't have to provide services to people you find objectionable, even if those people are in a protected class? It's a common but mistaken belief that we have no obligations to society or to our fellow citizens.

For hosting specifically, it depends on multiple factors: your ubiquity, the demographics of your audience, the intended/stated purpose, etc. For instance, the Supreme Court recently decided unanimously that social media is the public square, and so no law can restrict access to social media (they were trying to ban sex offenders from social media).

Considering Twitter's and Facebook's stated purposes are to become the place for all online conversation and debate, if they achieve that goal then censoring content arguably violates people's rights. Doubly so because people like Jack Conte have literally stated that access to social media is a human right.

So far almost all private censorship I've seen can be chalked up to profit motive. Payment processors don't like adult content not because they're prudes, but because there's a significantly increased risk of chargebacks, so why bother. Enabling illegal activities while maintaining plausible deniability and making easy profit off it? Why companies wouldn't do that? On the other hand, being a neutral platform is only fun until the Twitter mob notices you, after which you can choose between losing neutrality or getting painted as a bad actor on the front page of newspapers (sometimes you get the latter anyway, which incentivizes others to abandon neutrality preemptively). And even if you don't care, advertisers do care, because getting a mass-market product ad next to politically incorrect content may cause them issues with the Twitter mob and front page of the news.

I think it's just simpler than that, it's risk. Some content has a known level of "bad" risk associated with it, legal pornography for instance, but other content potentially has a massive and unquantifiable downside almost to the point of being an existential threat to a platforms business.

You can't force people to host content or be associated with hosting content which they fear will blow up in their faces.

Also, the two groups don't even seem to be on different sides, not really. Notice how this article doesn't have a single word of criticism for either the media articles decrying how terrible it is that tech companies allow violent and terrorist content to remain up, or the campaigns by major advertisers to pressure them to mass-censor all that content. It just pretends they didn't exist. The coverage of those campaigns by major media outlets was almost universally supportive. It's like the press are intentionally setting up a catch-22 for major tech companies, who coincidentally are eating into their profits and power.

> Controversy is inferred from like/dislike ratios and/or content reports, all of which is user-driven.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but I don't think it will be as simple as you think.

For instance, it's possible for a community to develop that thinks certain content is just fine, while another community does not, but is unaware of the first community or its content.

Then they suddenly through some mechanism become aware - and brigade the other community, stirring up controversy.

Heck, they could do this even if they weren't against the content, all for the purpose of having the content removed or otherwise censored, in order to drive their own narrative (which they may not be followers of either - ie, imposing some fake narrative or content on a community they don't believe in, in order to remove content they have no problem with, because of the lulz - seriously, there are some very weird, very toxic people out there who have found each other and do this all the time).

That's just one example I've thought of - the ways to game the system and cause problems with it are innumerable. I don't think this problem is something we will be able to fix as easily as that.

> I get crazy when effectively censor at the behest of (any) government under the “we’re private” excuse.

It's depressing how quickly people are willing to throw away the civil and human rights that have taken millennia to win. Let's hope it doesn't take actual violence to remind people of the difference between speech and violence. We haven't had real physical strife and a world war in our generation to keep this distinction fresh in our minds.