> What interesting controversial content are they banning specifically?

They ban interesting content all the time - a very recent example is they banned the AYTU Bioscience page where they talk about an experimental covid treatment.

YouTube censored their videos as well.

I think they have an understandable reason for that (too much harmful misinformation about covid going around, they don't have enough eyes to sort it out, and at their scale it's probably net harm reduction to put a simple wordfilter on it for now), but I'm a lot more sympathetic to arguments along these lines in particular. I could believe that moderation is more effective on smaller userbase-scales because it reduces the need to adopt blanket policies like this. I don't think it does the issue justice to reduce the problem down to just that there's too much/little censorship as the earlier post did.

Look up Lindsey Shepard of Canada and why she was banned.

Also the Aytu ban was pushed by a NYTimes writer and twitter often bends their rules to that. Aytu bioscience is a publicly traded company with deals with one of the largest hospitals on tech they have been working on since 2016. They even have a SEC filing from this week of their deal on the tech which twitter and YouTube both banned because a nytimes reporter complained (bias against the president).

>I'm really annoyed by the common effect where people complaining about censorship on the big platforms always complain about it in vague abstract terms

Ten people want to say thing 1 on twitter. Ten people want to say thing 2 on Twitter. Ten want to say thing 3, and so on for ten million things. Twenty people don't want to say anything particularly controversial and don't think anyone else should either. If the groups of ten don't address free speech as an abstract ideal, each of the hundred million will be individually silenced by the twenty.

The site already doesn't allow child pornography, nonconsensual pornography, posting of private information, targeted harassment, spambots, etc., and people almost exclusively choose sites using rules like these over ones that don't. (Is it not interesting that we're having this conversation on the heavily-moderated HN, and not on a free-for-all 4chan spinoff? That's not coincidental.) Either the site and the internet populace in general doesn't embrace the pure ideal of absolute free speech, or people accept that the ideal is best deployed with specific limitations.

Arguably calls to violence and ethnonationalist propaganda are things that should be similarly prohibited. I find it interesting that whenever there's a thread about an instance of that stuff being banned, people complaining about the ban rarely defend it specifically. They always go to arguing about some ideal of absolute free speech, but completely avoid the topic of what else that would allow. This setup makes me pretty suspicious of other cases that people avoid specifics and argue for absolute free speech on popular platforms. Whenever a platform bans something that's more defensible, people will always readily talk about and defend the specific thing that got banned rather than falling back to absolute generalizations about free speech.

Of course people only want speech protection for taboo topics, when else would they need protection?

It's easy to prove that taboo topics need to be allowed: it's taboo today to express the usual 2004 opinion on homosexuality, and it was taboo in 2004 to express today's usual opinion on the same topic. So no matter what your beliefs are you have to admit that you, personally, either need or needed cover for having taboo opinions.

No, of course I can't defend any individual taboo, I'm part of the group of normals that enforce them in polite society. However I have no choice to concede that out of the long list of 2020 taboos, one might be wrong.

There's a big difference between opinions that are merely taboo and opinions that get censored on social media. Not everything taboo gets censored and banned on social media.

Facebook/Twitter/popular social media as we know it barely existed in 2004, but I'm going to make a guess that discussing homosexuality wasn't banned on any of them (or whichever precursors of similar style and policies existed) around that timeframe. I feel like by picking that time frame, you're alluding to the speech standards that newspapers or TV imposed on themselves, and I'm very glad that social media doesn't impose that kind of standard on all of its users, but I don't think anything present suggests that social media is in danger of slipping to that standard. It looks like those dynamics are a world apart, and drawing these parallels is very misleading.

A bit of an aside, considering a taboo opinion which often prompts discussions about censorship online (an opinion that I think is bad and is taboo for good reasons, including that it's hard to detach from harmful calls to action, but I imagine it could be): talking about the possibility of differences in human capability in sex or race is taboo, but it's generally not outright censored in social media as long as it's not tied with calls to action like "#race war now". I feel like there's an overlap between those of the opinion social media is censoring too much and people outraged at James Damore being fired from Google, but I feel like people conflate him being fired from a tech company with the content moderation policies of social media. He was never banned from YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/Google services, but I get the impression that the volume of defense of him is linked to people thinking that did or will happen. It seems right to me that a large serve-everyone social media company would have different standards of its employees and the content hosted. (Silly example: I wouldn't expect a large social media site to ban a user for routinely posting that "$site is the worst", but I wouldn't find it surprising if an employee at that site was fired for that.) One could argue that Google went too far in firing him (and I'm glad those arguments are permitted in many places even though I disagree with them), but I often see it all bundled with the argument that this is a sign that social media itself is too censored and should be censored less, despite that it already permits him and that the enforcement line is still a world apart from him.

>It looks like those dynamics are a world apart

I guess my fundamental disagreement is that the two (censorship of taboos one deems undiscussable and censorship of taboos one deems discussable) don't seem so separate at all. Many of the same people want them, and for many of the same reasons. 1990s network TV was trying to appease the exact same public that Facebook would have tried to appease in 1990 if they existed back then and also had an attitude of appeasement. You, personally, have moderate views and sound relatively liberal in what you're willing to allow other people to discuss, but I'm not facing the decision of whether or not to appoint you as the censor: the issue at hand is whether or not we trust public outrage and the overall zeitgeist to determine what companies are afraid of being associated with, thereby determining what they censor. You can't set up a system with the idea that corporations will be reasonable or have a conscience.