[comice]

aside from the fact that for a variety of reasons, the BBC is not truly independent, if it's possible to build such an independent media company "funded via tax" then why isn't it possible to do the same for a social media company?

[afandian]

There's a continuum of infrastructure from electricity, telephone, ISP, email, social media and beyond. If we can run national utilities at the start of that scale, not necessarily nationalized, but nationally regulated, I don't see why we can't run them at the other end of the scale.

I think the real problem is that current models of social media are dreadful, although I don't know of anything better.