Beyond the trivial, there is no such thing as a neutral platform. At any sort of scale, you have to make choices. Do you host spammers or people who hate spam? Do you host would-be ethnic cleansers or the people they would violently drive away? Do you host people eager to exploit children, or do you want your platform to be safe for children? Do you host people who are eager to bother [insert ethnic, sexuality, or gender group] or the people they would be harassing?
Even if the people you find to run the platform are completely amoral, these are also business questions. People have freedom of association, and they will use it. Businesses will too. If you want to run a "neutral and objective" hosting company that is happy to take the nazis and the spammers and the carders and the ddosers, you will quickly find yourself specializing in that market, because few others will choose to be associated with that.
No, I don’t accept that it’s “the people” boycotting Kickstarter? It’s a small minority of media and activists threatening platforms with clickbait headlines, doxxing, and regulation if they don’t give up neutrality, and a larger group who believes whatever the media tells them or has no incentive to speak up. The choice Kickstarter made wasn’t “Do my customers have a principled stance against Unstable Diffusion?” It was, “Do I stand up for my principles - or do I have to put up with $MEDIA_OUTLET running wall to wall stories claiming I hate artists, 200 activists dogpiling my every twitter post, and ordinary people unconsciously associating me with whatever caricature they read on Twitter?” In this case and most others, neutrality is impossible because a minority has chosen to make it impossible, not because either Kickstarter or its customers made a principled decision. This is why this entire thread exists: to counterbalance this and to make clear that cowardice comes with its own costs.
Quick policy decisions needed! Do we block or promote Rohingyan folk art? Are "Russian" nesting dolls a microagression? Are suffragette ribbons hateful now?
The idea that platforms, all of them, need to enforce the day-to-day minutia of the chattering classes is ridiculous.
Platforms need to pick a few broad policies. "No porn" is a pretty good policy actually, and stick with it. And of course actually illegal things, "anything that is obviously illegal, or that we are told to take down with a warrant".
That is one set of choices. You'll get some people and you won't get others. But by picking cartoonish examples, you're failing to grapple with the real choices that platforms have to make all the time.
There is no such thing as a broad policy, not in practice. If you need to get a group of people to make consistent decisions about what porn is, and a much larger group of people to understand where the lines are and feel your judgments are fair, then you'll need extremely detailed polices.
If you allow self segregation you can host them all on your platform. Don't show the far right any far left content and vice versa. Disrupt any coordinated campaigns.
It certainly used to be the case that DNS servers would happily resolve both stormfront and the workers party websites. Would be good to go back to that pre cancellation world.
Oh? Reddit allows self-segregation. Do you think they don't have moderation problems? They too had to make choices.
And if you want to host the the nazis, nobody's stopping you but you. Most of us, though, don't think the world would be better if nazi propaganda were more easily available.
"Nazi" is such an annoying term these days... if a group shares a single idea or belief the nazi party did AND one doesn't like that group then they get called Nazis. Whether it's nationalisation, nationalism, not liking new pronouns, anti-immigrant sentiment, believing in violence to achieve political aims, state surveillance or ethnic segregation, believing Jews have too much influence or even having not disassociated from a group or individual with one of the above beliefs... having even a single thing in common (even if every other belief is different) is enough for the label these days...
Makes virtually every group (including antifa and BLM ironically) a "nazi" group, rendering the term meaningless.
Excellent try at running the conversation off into an irrelevant maze there. Who could possibly know if Stormfront, who you brought up and I was referring to, could be meaningfully be called neo-Nazi? Certainly not anybody very intent on keeping it murky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormfront_(website)
Regardless, your list of items help prove my point that there is no neutral. One can decide to platform or ban any or all of those things. Choosing to publish it all is no more neutral than banning it all.
Even if the people you find to run the platform are completely amoral, these are also business questions. People have freedom of association, and they will use it. Businesses will too. If you want to run a "neutral and objective" hosting company that is happy to take the nazis and the spammers and the carders and the ddosers, you will quickly find yourself specializing in that market, because few others will choose to be associated with that.