No, it's a consequence of not being on top of abuse on your platform. And because those big social media platforms are working really hard to avoid going down through no particular fault of their own they shut stuff like this down at the first sight of trouble.
HN does the same with spam, which is the only reason we can have this conversation in the first place. I take it that you do not consider that censorship?
If big platforms weren't so obsessed with trying to censor porn, there would be no need for people to hijack other platforms simply so they could create links to share porn. There's this bizarre obsession with "protecting" people from nudity (especially female nipples). Advertisers will stay away from your platform if there's nudity. Credit card companies will refuse to process your payments (or charge much, much steeper fees). And for what? So people can pretend that naked bodies don't exist? That sex isn't a thing? Seems odd to me. If I want to private message my friends dirty pictures, who is FB (or whatever platform) to tell me I can't?
As for spam, it's a shame that after 20+ years of the stuff, we still don't have a good answer for it. Some subset of people is spending money on whatever spammers are advertising, or they wouldn't be doing it.
If someone wants to set up a service where all that is within the TOS they are free to do so, just as there are other people who have decided otherwise.
None of what you said is limited by the freedoms that you already have, including starting your own platform.
But I'm sure that when you do, you too will find some things on it that you will want to block.
Broadly I agree with you - especially regarding payment processors - but the problem is that this
> If I want to private message my friends dirty pictures, who is FB (or whatever platform) to tell me I can't?
VERY quickly becomes "unsolicited dick pics." That "links to share porn" quickly becomes "links to share child porn", etc. You're not accounting for all the genuinely abusive users.
Sure. But the genuinely abusive users are always a minority. Although on the scale of FB and the likes, that could still be a large absolute number. Perhaps if we, as a society, stopped obsessing so much about nudity, unsollicited dick pics might become a thing of the past. One can dream, I guess.
