[throwaway894345]

I agree that we can't have zero moderation, but we should also recognize that large social media platforms have become the de facto public square and while it is lawful for them to moderate content, it's detrimental to our society. If I had to choose between trusting Twitter to moderate such a large volume of our society's speech and flat-footedly regulating them like a public utility to the extent that their quality drops and they vanish into the ether whence they came, I'd certainly choose the latter. That said, I think we can find middlegrounds that provide for high quality digital content while also allowing people to have robust speech freedoms in practice.

One such incarnation which is particularly interesting to me is the idea of regulating compliance with an open protocol such that Twitter doesn't own your social network, but rather they are simply one option through which you can access that social network. If you like Twitter's monetization model and moderation, great. If you don't, you can trivially go elsewhere (i.e., you don't have to leave your connections and conversations behind--you can continue to participate in the same conversations from your new social media portal) or even build your own.

[brandmeyer]

> but we should also recognize that large social media platforms have become the de facto public square and while it is lawful for them to moderate content, it's detrimental to our society.

Strong disagree. Social media platforms are no different from any other media platform. Should a newspaper or tv station be required to host official communications from a government administration? It is absolutely vital to democracy that they should be free to avoid publishing anything that they don't want to publish for any reason whatsoever including reasons we disagree with. Otherwise, every public sphere would devolve into state-controlled media.

The same restrictions must also hold true for communications from private citizens, especially given the global trend towards oligarchy.

[throwaway894345]

> Strong disagree. Social media platforms are no different from any other media platform. Should a newspaper or tv station be required to host official communications from a government administration? It is absolutely vital to democracy that they should be free to avoid publishing anything that they don't want to publish for any reason whatsoever including reasons we disagree with. Otherwise, every public sphere would devolve into state-controlled media.

My specific proposal doesn’t require compelling social media companies to publish anything. My proposal only turns social media companies into portals into an open platform, so you can leave Twitter or whomever without leaving your network (conversations, connections, etc).

But even if we can’t muster that, then we should regulate them as utilities—that’s really all they are anyway: plumbing for communication (hence the “network” in “social network”). We will still have the same free press that we’ve always had—nothing is lost, but we don’t have the threat of a tiny cabal of companies with outsized influence over our democracies.

But again, that’s a last resort. Before that extreme, we could even do some good ole fashioned antitrust action to bust these social media giants up into smaller actors, or simply enact stronger privacy legislation and let the leeches atrophy on their own.

[brandmeyer]

> My specific proposal doesn’t require compelling social media companies to publish anything. My proposal only turns social media companies into portals into an open platform, so you can leave Twitter or whomever without leaving your network (conversations, connections, etc).

Take a good, hard look at WeChat. You just proposed that we force the plethora of existing social media platforms to transform themselves into WeChat.gov portals.

> we should regulate them as utilities

We tried that with the only elements of the internet that actually are utilities: the networks themselves. It was called Network Neutrality, and the Trump administration killed it as soon as they took office on the grounds that it was government overreach.

[throwaway894345]

> Take a good, hard look at WeChat. You just proposed that we force the plethora of existing social media platforms to transform themselves into WeChat.gov portals.

No, that's obviously only true if we picked a protocol that was designed to support mass surveillance (a la WeChat), but there's no reason said protocol needs to be anti-privacy. This is baseless FUD.

> We tried that with the only elements of the internet that actually are utilities: the networks themselves. It was called Network Neutrality, and the Trump administration killed it as soon as they took office on the grounds that it was government overreach.

I don't think the Trump administration killed it because it wasn't working out very well in practice; they killed it because of an ideological disagreement (or more cynically, corruption). Which is to say, this is a political problem and indeed my proposal, like any proposal that pits the people against wealthy special interests, is subject to the same problem--we need to fix our national corruption problem, but that's an entirely different conversation so I'm ignoring it to focus on the practical aspects.

[neutronicus]

> we should also recognize that large social media platforms have become the de facto public square and while it is lawful for them to moderate content, it's detrimental to our society.

I don't think you appreciate how controversial this assertion is.

In certain circles, progress is seen as unattainable without a collectivist commitment to defining and suppressing harmful speech, and a de facto public square controlled by private entities as a welcome opportunity to do an end run around an onerous, entrenched legal obstacle in the first amendment.

[throwaway894345]

I appreciate this but I also suspect that many of the people who advocate for this kind of private public square aren’t thinking through the implications from the perspective of their own professed ideals. In general, many anti-free-speech, pro Twitter Inc folks are left wing and left wing ideals don’t align well with privatizing the regulation of civil liberties. I think this is more of an emotional reaction on their part than a principled stance.