You are pulling a dishonest thing here. You keep using the word "moderate" which means a very different thing from censor.
What they are doing is censoring. They are not "moderating." They are banning opinions they don't like, and it has not a d@mn thing to do with "moderating" a website, it has only to do with suppressing ideas they don't like.
So how about you stop your dishonest word swapping?
And to answer your question, I am coming around to the belief that when you get to be a certain size, you automatically attract the notice of the government, (or governments) which then forces you to be a proxy.
Or are all communications companies government agents?
It's beginning to look that way.
What do you think content moderation is?
It’s eliminating content you don’t like.
You may not like it because it’s not relevant to the theme of your forum, or you may think it’s spam, or you may think it’s inappropriate for children (who you want to be on your forum), or you may think it’s communist propaganda, or 100 other things. So what? It’s no one else’s business.
Those are all moderation and they’re all censorship by your definition.
But we all know you don’t really mean that, because it’s ludicrous.
What you want is for the government to bar private companies from restricting political speech, and specifically the political speech you disagree with.
And you’re fine with private companies, like Free Republic, restricting political speech because they only restrict the bad stuff.
You squeal when I bring this up but then turn around and demand that all communications companies be subject to government regulation of their speech.
To be clear, all private communications companies, including Facebook, Twitter, Free Republic, Truth Social, Gab, Blogger, and on and on censor speech. It’s perfectly legal and thank God they do because the internet would be an unusable cesspool if they didn’t.
Your notion that the government should prohibit private companies from censoring speech is anti-constitutional and completely at odds with a free society.
If people want to be heard there are countless ways for them to do so. If they need the government to confiscate private property on their behalf maybe their message isn’t as compelling as they thought.