Facebook have tried this. They have made am independent governing board that theoretically can tell Facebook what to do w.r.t. content censorship decisions.
No surprise, it appears to be staffed by people who were selected for their middle-of-the-road "you must censor a bit but not too much" type of views. It gave them a limp wristed rap on the knuckles when they banned Trump, said it was arbitrary and didn't follow the same rules enforced on everyone else, but that they still agreed with doing it.
I think what we're seeing here is what happens when you lack some sort of free speech libertarian fundamentalism. Facebook don't have to engage in "statecraft", whatever that is, no more than the designers of SMTP did. They could choose not to. They could say "we will shut down accounts when under court order to do so, end of story". Then governments who think a citizen is breaking a law about speech would have to go to court, win, and then the judge would say, here is an order requiring Facebook to shut down the account of this law breaker (which could automatically hide all content they created). All the evolved mechanisms, the checks and balances of the actual state would be in effect.
But Facebook is based in Silicon Valley and like most firms there, has systematically made deals with far-left devils in order to hire them and put them to work, often without really understanding if it's worth the cost. Does Google actually need 144,000 employees for example? It hardly seems more productive than when I started there and it had 10,000. Their "hire first ask questions later" approach inevitably leads to hiring lots of extremists and wingnuts, people who are there primarily to get closer to a nexus of power they can wield for their own political agendas. The constant dramas we see emanating from Mountain View, Palo Alto and San Francisco are the inevitable consequence.
Tech firms could fix this problem very quickly if they wanted to: just announce a renewed commitment to freedom of speech, platform principles and passive moderation. Any employee who doesn't like it can leave. Many would, but those companies are so over-staffed they'd barely notice, and the environment for those who remain would be drastically more pleasant.
