Oh, am I glad I review replies to my recent comments on a semi-regular basis.

I believe that the First Amendment does not give anyone the "right" to limit the freedom of association of any other person.

It does. It absolutely does. Just not in the broader sense you’re thinking of.

The First Amendment protects the right of association, in that you can choose the people with whom you want to associate. But it doesn’t give you the right to make them associate with you. It also doesn’t give you the right to associate with people while on private property you don’t own. You can associate with other users on Twitter, but if Twitter kicks you out, those users can (and must) find other ways to associate with you. To say otherwise would mark you as a believer in compelled association vis-á-vis the owner of that private property (in this example, Twitter). The First Amendment doesn’t let you do that any more than it lets Twitter stop you from associating with Twitter users outside of Twitter.

Certainly, when one or more persons "assemble" to create a discussion context, they should be free to establish and maintain ground rules which they believe will facilitate what they consider to be the desired discussion.

And if they’re assembling on property at least one of the persons owns, they’re more than free to do that. But on property they don’t own, the owner makes the rules — and can enforce them however they see fit. To say otherwise is, again, to believe in compelled association.

I moderate others’ speech with their permission, not by right.

That’s a lovely approach. But I hope you realize that Facebook can literally tell you to moderate another way. Because Facebook owns the property on which your group exists (the servers). Zuckerberg himself could tell you to moderate more heavily “or else” and you could risk losing that group by defying his orders. He can moderate the speech of your group (and your own speech) by right, not by permission. The same goes for any other owner of private property you don’t own.

my moderation would be on weaker ground if I had been successful in creating a service like Facebook, Gmail, USENET, etc. that claimed to be and became useful for the discussion of essentially all legal topics by millions, or billions, of people. At some point, my once legitimate control over the content of other’s discussions passes beyond being a service whose benefits are freely chosen by others and becomes an illegitimate imposition of my personal beliefs on others’ rights to speak or to listen.

Let’s say that’s true. You would still have the right to impose those limits on others because, hey, you would still own the property on which they’re congregating.

The law doesn’t limit the right of association based on the size of a property or an amount of people. Your site could be used by ten people and you would still have the unassailable legal right to kick one of them out for saying “bitch” (in any context).

You’re stepping into the moral and ethical issues without first considering the already-settled legal ones. You’re also close to advocating for forced association, which…doesn’t speak well of you.

it is inappropriate to allow platform providers to impose content moderation without the consent of individual participants

I now have a few yes-or-no questions for you:

1. Should services such as Twitter be forced by law to receive permission for moderation from every individual user on an individual basis?
2. Should that moderation apply generally to all content produced by the user, or only to content that the user marks as “moderate-able”?
3. Should rules set forth by Twitter before they ask for permission to moderate — e.g., the current terms of service — still apply if the answer from a user is “no”? (In other words: Should the TOS and its consequences still be applied if a user says “don’t moderate my shit” and proceeds to post an anti-queer slur?)
4. Should Twitter be held legally liable for unlawful/illegal speech if that speech comes from a user who said “no” to having their content moderated?

Facebook, Twitter, etc. might still invest a great deal in content moderation and offer it as a service, but users should choose individually whether or not to accept such services.

By accepting the terms of service and subsequently using those services, they have made that choice. They can go elsewhere if they disagree with the moderation efforts of Twitter. I hear Parler is up and running again, by the by.

I would go a step further and suggest that participants (in at least general and "dominant" contexts) should be able to choose from among a variety of content moderation services or methods of achieving moderation.

Your suggestion would be largely unworkable. Individual people might demand moderation methods so finely granulated that they can only be applied to an individual user. That would defeat the purpose of site-wide moderation efforts. (It would also make moderation a vastly more costly affair in terms of both man hours and money.)

I should, for instance, be able to choose to have ratings made by third-party factchecking organizations (NYTimes, WaPo, etc.) used either on their own or in conjunction with those offered by a platform.

And you can do that…by making your own service that aggregates such ratings, should they already exist. For what reason should the burden for doing that lie on the shoulders of Twitter or Facebook, other than “they’re big”?

I recognize the difficulty of providing and financing such a variety of services. Here, I’m talking about what should be, not necessarily what can be easily provided.

At least you admit that. Some people can’t even be bothered to do that much.

The minimal need should be to allow one to accept or decline one or more of a "dominant" platform’s moderation services.

People can do that — by choosing to use, or not use, that service. The service operators tailor their moderation efforts to what they believe works best for the broader community. Moderation is an effort at community curation. No one gets it right all the time, but trying to curate individual experiences on an individual level is far, far, far more trouble than any possible benefits could be worth.

if I were to amend Sec. 230 in light of these thoughts on an individual’s freedom to "hear" or to associate, I think what I would argue for is that the language which now allows a service to do content moderation should be rewritten to actually forbid the non-optional imposition of such moderation in any but constrained and limited contexts

And there we have it: You’re literally arguing for legally compelled association.

Your idea would end up doing the same thing all the other 230 reform ideas would do: It would make services either undermoderate or stop accepting third-party speech altogether. (Overmoderation would likely not be an option with your idea, given how much you see to abhor the idea of any moderation whatsoever.) That means Twitter would either turn into 8kun or turn into a digital graveyard. Does either one of those two visions sound like the outcome you’ve been wishing for?

Clearly, defining the contexts in which choice is required would be a challenge

Try “impossible”. The United States has no law against “hate speech” for a similar reason: No one has come up with an objective definition for the term that doesn’t also whack away at legally protected speech. (And I’ll remind you here that racial slurs and what we would colloquially call “hate speech” is legally protected.) Trying to define specific contexts/categories for “non-optional” moderation efforts would hit a similar brick wall. For example: If “talk of eating disorders” could be moderated without “user permission”, what would stop a service from silencing proponents of eating disorders such as bulimia and survivors of that same disorder? For that matter, what would stop a service from silencing people who talk about anorexia and people who talk about ARFID, regardless of context? (Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder, for the record.)

And far from providing ample opportunity for expression, such “regulated” moderation would stifle expression. After all, who would speak out against racism if their sharing of the racist words and actions flung at them would face instant moderation?

I am confident that we could arrive at some reasonable definition.

Your confidence in your idea is somewhat admirable, but ultimately foolish. Better people than you have tried and failed to thread this needle; you won’t accomplish what they couldn’t.

Twitter admins have no right to choose the speech and persons with which you or I will and will not associate.

They do have that right — on Twitter. Who the fuck are you to say they shouldn’t?

If we change anything in Sec. 230, it should be to ensure protection of our right to choose with whom we will associate.

Section 230 doesn’t prevent that. You can fuck around with Charlie Kirk or chill with Bernie Sanders, depending on your political preferences. 230 can’t stop you from doing that.

But 230 extends to cyberspace an important principle from meatspace: You can’t associate with people on private property you don’t own if the owners of that property tell you, the other people, or all of you to fuck every last mile of off. I can’t think of a good reason, and you have offered no good reason, to deny the admins of any social interaction network — Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon instances, even that fucking shitpit Gab — that right. I wish you luck in finding one.

…if you still think you can.