> in which the marketplace of filters is enabled to compete
Well, that's a nice thought, but the goal of deplatforming is to remove somebody entirely. Nobody was forced to follow Trump on twitter - he had tens of millions of voluntary followers. If your goal is to get rid of Donald Trump, you have to centralize the decision.
This isn't exactly right. Part of the debate was that Twitter is the platform and the platform should not censor. This left Trump without any authoritative criticism other than the sea of response tweets.
In a decentralized systems, you would have many platform providers, many decentralized features and also many filters. In a decentralized system, the filtering/curating holds less ethical baggage (ie just choose another filter you like more!). Curators are free to curate more heavily.
If there was one single email platform, every spam marking would be a political and ethical hill to die on. Instead its a non-issue.
1. I don't want to hear Donald Trump, and I don't want to associate with anyone who likes him, or hear their ideas in my feed: this is solvable by distributed systems like Mastodon where node operators can just blacklist the Trump-aligned servers, and apply rules on their own.
2. I want Donald Trump to be silenced and not be able to say dangerous inflammatory things that rile his supporters up into violent attacks on democratic processes: this is going to require a centralized decision and really probably would work best if it was a law.
Deplatforming can partially work by demanding all reasonable node operators block the person. But then you get the ones whose niche is to be a haven of scum and villainy, like Gab, and they refuse.
This may be enough, though, if it isolates awful people into inaccessible backwaters.
Well, that's a nice thought, but the goal of deplatforming is to remove somebody entirely. Nobody was forced to follow Trump on twitter - he had tens of millions of voluntary followers. If your goal is to get rid of Donald Trump, you have to centralize the decision.