[sokoloff]

> if a company directly contributes to decline in civil discourse and harms democracy, and thereby harms the users, then isn't it a government role to step in?

The chief problem here is “who decides?” If a government in power is being undermined, they have incredibly strong incentives to determine that those undermining actions are “harmful to democracy” (rather than merely harmful to their party). (I think we could point to many examples in US politics in the last 5 years where “this is bad for my party” is cast as “this is bad for democracy!”)

Which is why I think that, of all the speech that must be protected, political speech is of the highest criticality to protect. (And that claims by the government or strongly politically aligned citizens that ‘X is bad for democracy’ should also be viewed with a healthy amount of skepticism.)