[restingrobot]

First of all, Facebook is not a utility. No matter what you think, it is literally not classified a utility at this time.

Second, just because governments, companies, or people choose to use it to communicate, does not mean it is a utility. There is a choice and many, many alternatives to Facebook. Utility status is reserved for things like power water and gas, (even internet in many places), as there are physical barriers to choice.

Third, it is not unconstitutional for utilities to ban customers in the United States.

[robbedpeter]

If it represents the sole method of communication by some government entity, I can see a case being made that every citizen has a right to a "read only" (maybe even read only, read once?) minimized level of access, at some explicit cost to the government entity using the platform (offloading liability from the company and onboarding accountability with the backing of law. )

Facebook is obviously not a utility, in the US at least. It's also not "just" a private entity. It's a novel thing for which we don't have an existing legal framework in which to capture all the nuanced uses, rights, responsibilities, and liabilities.

Facebook has taken on the role of managing the distribution of information to billions of people. It handles communications between groups and individuals. Given how critical those activities are to a healthy, liberal, free society, we should take steps to protect the rights and duties of individual users and platforms. Maybe we'll coalesce into a roughly cooperative country sometime in the future an accomplish that.

[restingrobot]

>Facebook has taken on the role of managing the distribution of information to billions of people. It handles communications between groups and individuals. Given how critical those activities are to a healthy, liberal, free society, we should take steps to protect the rights and duties of individual users and platforms. Maybe we'll coalesce into a roughly cooperative country sometime in the future an accomplish that.

Facebook has specifically designated itself as a platform, not a content provider. IF what you are saying is true, we need to remove Section 230 protection and force Facebook to be accountable for all of its content.

Personally I think there are countless alternatives to Facebook and trying to nationalize into a utility, or regulate it with an agency will only serve to foment authoritarianism.

[robbedpeter]

I don't think they should be responsible for the content, except in how they distribute the content. The timelines, labeling, presentation, promotion, and suppression of user generated content are the tools they use to maximize engagement and advertisement value.

If someone posts a pirated copy of a movie, Facebook is obviously not responsible for piracy. That's on the individual. If Facebook promoted the post, did something so that a million people saw it instead of a few hundred then that amplification is something they should be held responsible for. The vocabulary of legal and ethical models of previous xcommunication technology doesn't fully apply to social media.

We need laws to specifically call out the misuses of social media algorithms and control systems. We already have a good framework for the content of speech, so allowing "whatever is federally legal" seems to me to be a reasonable constraint on platforms, with a reasonably defined minimum level of user distribution control (you can post to people that subscribe to your feed, but the platform doesn't have to index or make your content discoverable, maybe. ) Curation and manipulation of content beyond what the user is responsible for seems a reasonable line for liability, to me.

The societal problem is the amplified negative interactions, creating feedback loops of doom and dissension.

Then again, decentralization and federation kicks a lot of these issues to the curb, so maybe the next generation of social platforms will get rid of the issues for us.