Describing Zuck's censorship of nearly 200 million posts on Facebook alone as "moderating content" is like calling a tsunami "a bit of rain". It's irresponsible.
Calling a platform with 3 billion monthly users a "glorified bulletin board" doesn't sound very credible to me either.
Scale matters. Everyone on HN knows this.
Why would the Biden Admin have a right to lean on FB to censor true and important information?
"We need you to censor this false [read: true] information from your 3 billion users, because reasons" - not a very defensible position.
By the way, I've advocated for tearing Meta apart and putting it in global public ownership for years, partly because of their acceptance of over-censorship. There's such a thing as public responsibility, and Meta has repeatedly failed. I said so here, just yesterday.
I'm 100% fine with Meta and others censoring some things: drug sales, scams (I wish they would!), and worse.
But censoring scientists trying to say true things of a devastating pandemic, or minimize the harms from terrible policy? Censoring discussion of stories that politicians find embarrassing? Censoring the word "Zionist"??!! That's indefensible.
Again, there's a basic responsibility there; whether enshrined in law or not, and whether the law is enforced or not. Allowing a platform used by nearly half all people on Earth to warp our collective understanding of issues up to and including war, plague, genocide and famine is unacceptable, whether by government "request" or not.