I don't know what the right answer is but as far as analogies go the phone companies don't decide which calls you get and which of your incoming calls/texts to make a priority.
Twitter and certainly Facebook do run algorithms that decide which of the 300 things the 1000 people you friended or follow should be displayed and in what order so they get decide what to emphasize as important by deciding what you see first and even what you see at all.
In order to be the same as the phone company they'd have to give you the entire feed of every person you follow in chronological order, no filtering.
I suppose one solution for them. They could default to no filtering and let users turn on filters. Then it would be the user's choosing the filters, not them. I'm not sure what scrutiny the filters themselves would need.
A simple filter like "show nothing with the word 'poop' in it" would seem safe. A complex filter like "let this ML algo decide for me" I have no idea.
The problem is that right now these big Internet companies aren't "dumb pipes" like phone companies--they are moderating content already, so either they shouldn't moderate at all or they should accept responsibility for how they moderate. If they're making money by persecuting certain groups or enabling child porn or whatever, they should be held accountable. If they're just dumb pipes, then that's fine, but they mustn't moderate content.
Twitter and certainly Facebook do run algorithms that decide which of the 300 things the 1000 people you friended or follow should be displayed and in what order so they get decide what to emphasize as important by deciding what you see first and even what you see at all.
In order to be the same as the phone company they'd have to give you the entire feed of every person you follow in chronological order, no filtering.
I suppose one solution for them. They could default to no filtering and let users turn on filters. Then it would be the user's choosing the filters, not them. I'm not sure what scrutiny the filters themselves would need.
A simple filter like "show nothing with the word 'poop' in it" would seem safe. A complex filter like "let this ML algo decide for me" I have no idea.