This is messy. On the one hand, private companies should be free to establish and enforce policies they find suitable. On the other hand, these social media giants are incorporated under government law and deeply intertwined with political interests, pulling themselves way out of the orbit of the market economy.
Censoring dissenters does nothing to disprove the dissenting opinions or dissuade people from considering unapproved ideas, it just drives discourse underground. This is part of why stupidity like white supremacy thrives in the darker corners of the web, maintaining echo chambers of self-reinforcing stupidity.
I think I would be OK with sites adding an icon beside posts deemed controversial or doubtful, but hiding them is just not cool.
I generally agree with what you have said here. However, the reality is (as you have stated), that these so-called 'private' companies would have never had the exposure or the market share they do today, without large sums of seed funding and manipulation that benefited them as a start-up, from both political influence and private hands with deep seeded government and intelligence contacts. They always thrive from cronyism.
The problem with saying it's ok to allow them to label a comment, is that it will be subjective and manipulated by the person or 'persons' doing the moderating, just like we have now. Not only do these 'fact-checkers' deliberately deceive the public as fact checking operations, but It's not difficult to then steer something into a completely different direction, after setting the initial policy.
Yes, they are private companies, but also received government funds at some point as I recall. They acted like open public squares at first, then when they grew in wealth and power they decided to control the openness of the platforms more, betraying the original purpose.
This is mostly what I think as well. Private companies should be able to censor as they fit. The issue is when they become publishers/editors by saying what is true and what isn't. They shouldn't be allowed to have their cake and eat it too. Either they are a platform where they can moderate posts or they are a publisher who can get sued for what they publish or edit.
Sites always walk a fine line on some kinds of content. Gore, pornography, and anything else that falls under "NSFW" drives away a lot of potential users. Truly criminal things like child pornography and identity theft need to be curtailed somehow. Steemit/Hive rely on tags, reputation scores, and downvotes to organically moderate a lot, but the recent Steemit censorship campaign focusing on dissenters instead of spammers and plagiarists gaming the system revealed a huge flaw in central control even on our system here.
DPoS = plutocracy, rule by money masters. Who has the money does what they want.