Any electronic communication system that doesn't block spam soon gets choked with it, which is why all modern systems have anti-spam designed in - even email servers now have spam-blocking built in.
I hope we are learning that same lesson for fake news/lying, and for hate, and, above all, for Nazis.
I do hope that Twitter, and YouTube, and Facebook are realising that they need to design-in anti-Nazi systems like they designed-in anti-spam systems.
I used to read news.admin.net-abuse in the early/mid nineties, when the moral/ethical question of whether to block spam was still an open question.
It took years for people to realise that if we didn't block spam, then we wouldn't see anything else on email or usenet.
And that was technical admins who had to realise, not tech CEOs, who tend to be much more stubborn and less able to accept input.
But... But...
They're still the same cultural group. They still have instincts about not blocking things - which are pretty good instincts in general.
And they learned. They learned that the platforms they'd built didn't work without blocking spam. I watched it happen. In public, over several years, one admin at a time.
So yeah, I think the tech CEOs are learning the same lesson, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, et al.
And, btw, if you want to build a forum that allows spam, you can. I won't read it.
One of the big problems I have with social media is that there isn't a good way to say "don't say that *here*". Back on Usenet, or internet forums, there was a sense of place, and some comment would not belong on a particular place.
Other than facebook's groups, there isn't that on the social media. So if you want to say "no Nazis" you have to say "no Nazis", not "Nazis only in our Nazi forum and don't go there unless you want to encounter Nazis".
@thamesynne I agree with all of that. Facebook's groups do that, and I'm increasingly inclined to restructure my FB to have personal stuff on my wall and do everything else in groups.
@po8crg federation does, in theory, bring back some of that - "no Nazis" basically means "we don't allow Nazis on our instance, and we won't talk to those who do". But it's much more difficult when everything just gets chucked into a single timeline. (Lists help a bit... but not much, and the admin overhead is onerous.) One thing Usenet (and IRC) really got right was the idea of channels within the same framework; now we have to choose between topic soup or channels in isolation.