Comment by danShumway

> at least provides consistency, rather than leaving the issue to fairweather service providers and perfidious content policies

Once again, I think this is a perfect example of what I mean when I say that people who advocate for more government involvement haven't thought about this issue enough.

Consistent censorship results in more censorship than you would see with inconsistent censorship by fairweather services.

If you want any argument about that, consider that Cloudflare dropped a number of sex sites specifically after SESTA/FOSTA was passed and not before.

Of course, it would be better to have neither situation, but an inconsistent patchwork of censorship is obviously less censorship than a consistently applied standard that even free-speech-absolutists like Cloudflare have to follow.

> or find ways around the letter of the law (Backpage pre-2018).

Once again, light legislation leads to more wiggle room for companies to interpret the law, which tends to result in less censorship overall. As proven by Backpage pre-2018.

You can still fight inconsistent censorship in the courts. You can still have laws struck down. You can still work to change public perception of censored speech or normalize it. Unless you're aiming for an acceleration of censorship (which is a usually a bad strategy), then "at least" and "provides consistency" shouldn't be chained together in the same sentence. If you believe that something is a negative outcome, a consistently negative outcome is worse than an inconsistently negative outcome.

This isn't just a free speech thing, it's just a general principle that accelerationists don't always completely grasp: the scenarios where accelerationism works to produce preferable outcomes are kind of narrow and rare. I don't want to get stabbed at all, but I prefer a world where I might get stabbed over a world where I definitely will get stabbed. Making the stabbings more consistent isn't an improvement.