When radio was king, many outlets chose to stop broadcasting Father Coughlin
The big problem here is that writing a regulation that decides what&#x27;s okay &#x2F; not okay on a platform (either by the platform itself or by a govt) is basically impossible.<p>Any sort of you-shalt-not-serve-this-content type of rulebook won&#x27;t stand up to real world use and you need a team of lawyers to exercise judgement on if content is allowed or not allowed on a platform.<p>A couple of examples to de-politicize this:<p>- FB says gore &#x2F; violence is not allowed. There was a Facebook post on how one of Mexico&#x27;s most violet cartel members was killed that circulated on FB [1], received a lot of attention, and popped up in people&#x27;s feeds leading to cries to take down the post (won&#x27;t someone think of the kids!). They did take it down and then the Boston marathon bombing happened. Similar pictures of blood &#x2F; gore circulated but this time FB was forced to keep the pictures up in &quot;public interest&quot;.<p>- Nudity is not allowed on the platform. As part of their nudity filtering, they kicked off a group on breastfeeding from FB which again lead to protest and FB allowing it and modifying their policy to specifically make an exception for breastfeeding. YT and Amazon suffer from this as well (though we haven&#x27;t had a big PR bust up yet). Amazon algorithms for instance recommend &quot;adult&quot; fiction (with provocative cover art) along with children&#x27;s books. Beyond just playing whack-a-mole with these products, and some half assed attempts to detect nudity in book covers, I don&#x27;t think a lot of progress has been made.<p>So yeah, I think Zuck will be more than happy to say, please tell us what to allow on the platform and we&#x27;ll follow it to the letter and deflect the blame to the regulators.<p>It&#x27;s not even clear that there&#x27;s a solution here beyond let the platforms exercise their best judgement and sort of muddle along.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;4&#x2F;1&#x2F;5569878&#x2F;the-dark-side-of-the-facebook-revolution" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;4&#x2F;1&#x2F;5569878&#x2F;the-dark-side-of-t...</a>