> I'm interested in knowing how you think a real "free speech" platform can actually work, however.
Let me give this a shot. There are two types of content that need to be removed: (1) spammy content that readers themselves don't want to see, and (2) illegal content that society doesn't want anybody to see. I think these two need to be addressed separately.
Illegal content includes copyright infringement, violations of NDAs, libel, slander, perverting the course of justice (violations of court orders), incitements to violence, consipracy to commit a crime, exposing troop movements, and in general anything that directly causes damages which could be assessed and recovered in a court of law. Racism, sexism, homophobia, "hate speech", advocacy of violence, falsehoods, trickery, promoting very dangerous ideas, lying about (or being incorrect about) vaccines, lying (or being incorrect) about who won an election, offensive speech, and jokes of all kinds are, at least in America, all forms of protected speech.
Illegal content must be taken down when ordered by a court to do so. AFAIK the platform isn't responsible to take anything down unless ordered by a court to do so, but I'm probably just ignorant -- PLEASE dont take legal advice from some random armchair pontificator on the internet like myself. Section 230(c)(1) protects the platform as they are not deemed to be the speaker.
Most people are terrible judges of whether something is illegal or not. For example, many congresspeople think Trump's Jan 6 speech was illegal (it wasn't) because it incited violence (it didn't). It didn't even advocate for violence. The idea that it was illegal is so far beyond Brandenberg to be laughable if it wasn't so serious... but back to the point... Attempts to proactively take down illegal content will invariably take down some legal content, probably lots of legal content, which is why a true "ideal" free speech platform would not attempt to do this... one must have humility and recognize one's near utter inability to determine what is and what is not illegal to any reasonable degree of accuracy during times of political strife like we find ourselves in today. The popular opinion right now is that all of us should enact justice upon each other according to our own personal interpretation of justice... which is just nuts when you think about it. Let's leave law enforcement up to the law enforcement professionals.
The first issue, the spammy content, would then be handled the same way we handle email spam. Plug into the spam filtering service of your choice, subscribe to rulesets, or write your own. I don't know of any platform that lets you plug in your own moderation, and so that's where I think they've all gone wrong - they either get flooded with spam or antisemites and become nearly useless to nearly everybody, or else some moderation team thinks it is their role to filter spam on behalf of the community and the community gets pissy that they filtered the wrong things. These two extremes are both wrong. Users can filter their own content if given the right tools. BTW, Section 230(d) requires providers notify their customers that parental control protections are commercially available... it puts the onus on the users to solve this for themselves... even way back when that law was written.
I'm going to add a third issue, flooding. That has a content neutral solution: throttling.