I was with you until the very end, when I feel like you threw away the argument by seemingly being open to "legal requests"; the "political wars" you get dragged into tend to be from politicians that are certainly making "legal requests": hell, if they aren't legal, they change the law!
I feel like the core problem in many cases was building a system where someone gets to be arbiter of content in the first place: Apple claims they take software down due to "legal requests" by/in various countries (though this is a lie as they also do it anti-competitively or for market perception reasons, but even taking them at their word here) and yet they caused the ability to do that as somehow Android devices sold in the same jurisdictions support installing arbitrary software without issue.
Platforms like Twitter and YouTube make their problems worse by recommending content--which is entirely their editorial decision and should be seen as such: any benefits or costs, moral or legal, should fall squarely on their shoulders--and then conflating that with having the ability to publish, but they would be in a much more morally (and often legally) defensible position if they simply didn't actively recommend content they disliked but still let it be found by people who actively followed the publisher.
Regardless, as usual, I will now link to my heavily-cited talk (every single slide is inherently a citation from a reputable news source) that I gave in 2017 (maybe 2018? the video was unlisted and I only just recently made it public as someone noted I had never done that, and now the upload date is weirdly set to last week ;P) at Mozilla Privacy Lab--"That's How You Get a Dystopia"--wherein I push hard at the idea that centralized systems and the arbiters they empower are the core problem and never work out, even if you like some of their decisions for some of the time.
https://youtu.be/vsazo-Gs7ms