I think Reddit handles porn well. If you don't want to see porn images, they are just a NSFW picture in the thumbnail, and nobody forces you to click on it. If you want stricter parent controls, that is ok to censor much more aggressively for porn.
As to political speeches, I find it completely unacceptable that a private company gets to decide what stays on and what not. For example just the other day Youtube threatened to shut down the Senate channel in Romania because of the speeches of one of the senators. She is a wacko, true, but she is a Senator in the Romanian senate and didn't violate any law, it's unacceptable that private companies get to decide what is free speech nowadays. The Romanian MPs have special protections in the law, and the most important one is the free speech. They have even more free speech that any citizen of Romania. But hey, youtube is above the Romanian Constitution.
Who is going to hold Youtube employees accountable? What democratic or judicial process is there to have checks and balances on that? Just saying: move to another platform is not good enough. You can't cut off the phones of your political adversaries and just say: buy a cell phone with another carrier.
If the platform is becoming overwhelmed with extremist content, then it's on to the platform to find ways to better show the most relevant content to each user (e.g. burying it), but outright banning non-illegal content should be illegal.
For political content I was thinking more of qanon content. Also you can bury it in the recommendation sense but you can’t bury it in the search engine sense without removing it. The mere existence of qanon like content on the platform even if it requires searching causes a platform a lot of problems. Burying content in recommendation sense that is brand problematic but not actually that bad does already happen for these platforms. This may be content that is just too common on the platform otherwise to try to diversify available content.
Reddit is one of the very lax content platforms but has occasionally banned subreddits including political ones (Donald trump subreddit). Your phone example I don’t agree with as content platforms are fundamentally about curating a certain group of content. I think of them as closer to news media in terms of what they show. You would not expect New York Times to have much very conservative articles and opposite for Fox News. While content platforms have user generated content mostly that defines the available content pool not what they want to recommend. Actual percent of banned things is pretty low so they do mostly allow any content but there are certainly categories of content they spend a lot of effort on. As for another motivation for political banning one complaint tiktok often receives is as a Chinese related company it should not influence American politics. If it wants to be safe there then it having extreme content becomes legal risky itself. Not so much in the it is directly illegal sense but in the increasing chances of the platform getting banned which felt like a serious risk a few months ago. I think in general a lot of the political content restriction motivation is legal in origin in the sense of wanting to avoid issues that cause congress to do stuff to the platform. Similarly Facebook and all the Anti trust talks one way of being careful is trying to restrict extreme political content that otherwise senators may complain about.
There’s also related should political advertisements be allowed.
As to political speeches, I find it completely unacceptable that a private company gets to decide what stays on and what not. For example just the other day Youtube threatened to shut down the Senate channel in Romania because of the speeches of one of the senators. She is a wacko, true, but she is a Senator in the Romanian senate and didn't violate any law, it's unacceptable that private companies get to decide what is free speech nowadays. The Romanian MPs have special protections in the law, and the most important one is the free speech. They have even more free speech that any citizen of Romania. But hey, youtube is above the Romanian Constitution.
Who is going to hold Youtube employees accountable? What democratic or judicial process is there to have checks and balances on that? Just saying: move to another platform is not good enough. You can't cut off the phones of your political adversaries and just say: buy a cell phone with another carrier.
If the platform is becoming overwhelmed with extremist content, then it's on to the platform to find ways to better show the most relevant content to each user (e.g. burying it), but outright banning non-illegal content should be illegal.