This was written on cohost.org and thus references some matters that had happened around this time. Much of this thinking applies to other websites and is why I rarely talk about social media companies since they’re all going to be a waste of time in some way.

Rarely do I dare wade into the discourse, but I felt like it was time and I need to voice my support for the decisions made by @staff to the benefit of the site as a whole. It is hard to discuss content moderation openly and their decision to open the floor on content many who see it as objectionable as well as not was not only brave, but completely the opposite of what one would expect from much bigger social media outlets.

Like many, I find a lot of content disturbing. I am not going to hide this fact. However, regardless of the reasons for my biases, it is irrelevant to the reality that cohost faces: it is a small operation, moderation requires a lot of resources, and moderation on a service with an international audience is extremely fraught with legal jurisdictional landmines.

This point is lost on so many people in the comments made in recent posts by the cohost staff, leading to inappropriate ad hominem remarks and outright accusing them of censorship.

Let’s talk about the second point, because the first one has me quite angry.

Firstly: if you scroll down to the bottom of any page on cohost, you’ll notice that has a copyright mark belonging to anti software software club llc who describes themselves as a “not-for-profit software company”. If you have never seen the term “LLC” before, it means “limited liability company” and that should be your first clue about what grounds you stand on.

As an LLC, this makes cohost a private space. As a private space, cohost has every right within the confines of the laws they’re governed by to do whatever they want. This means and is not limited to deciding on what content they wish to permit or deny on this website. This also means they have every right to object to your participation on this website and that is regardless of what sort of financial relationship you might have engaged in.

Because of cohost belonging to an actual company, all staff have to abide by the laws of whatever jurisdictions apply to them. But because this is also the Internet, laws of which apply to users outside of the jurisdiction of what cohost itself is subject to come into play.

Many of the dissenters against cohost often look inward at their own countries’ principles and never consider the headaches others face. I am not an American and I do not live in the United States, so while I may benefit from cohost’s existence at the will of the American constitution and its federal and state laws, I am still subject to the laws of Canada and the European Union because of my nationalities.

There have been Supreme Court cases in Canada which have made certain content outright illegal to possess and there are laws in Germany against certain imagery of which I need not elaborate on. These are just a small sample of situations where if cohost wants to exist for an audience outside of the jurisdiction it is legally incorporated in.

If we flip this on its head, despite the fact that the United States is not the country I live in, the DMCA still ends up applying to me. If I download a movie through illicit means and I am caught, despite my ISP being outside of the country, they’ll still handle a DMCA claim against them because failing to do so has repercussions for them as a service if they wish to benefit from connecting to the United States. This is very simplified, but I am certain that you understand this logic.

For cohost to exist outside of an American vacuum, they have to consider what content they wish to permit. The alternative for them is to do what every small non-European website does when they don’t want to deal with GDPR: block anyone from the EU. This happens and if this small group of people were to get their way, cohost would effectively become an American-only website.

Is it censorship for them to remove content they decide is objectionable? Of course it is. Is it bad? Objectively, not really. And to further this: it’s a private space.

And that is where the first part I skipped needs to come up: this isn’t your space.

For cohost to come out and talk about this the way they did, it wasn’t an invitation for you as an individual to act as if somehow your rights were being violated because they decided as a private entity what they wish to have on their private space–irrelevant of whether or not you have paid for the service.

Also if you’re an American and you’re going to rattle off “free speech”, you should feel ashamed of the fact that a foreigner is more aware of your rights than you are.

If tomorrow it was decided by the staff that my posting about obscure video games was not going to be allowed on this website, that is their decision. Am I going to like it? No.

And that is the point: if you’re here to post content that cohost, a private company no less, objects to, you know where the door is. You can complain on some other website about cohost and let an echo chamber make you feel better, but maybe consider that there are other people here too and you have to share this space under the rules set by cohost themselves.

All of this falls on the shoulders of three people who are human beings. They are here to provide a website for us to shitpost on. They don’t have the resources to moderate content which often requires nuance to understand and examine. Speaking professionally, I do not want them to have that burden (I for certain know more about this than you do). If they don’t want the content you want to post on here, that is your problem and not theirs.

At least we don’t have to worry about people buying us custom titles.