[emteycz]

Facebook page is not necessary communication. That's telephone and mobile networks. Healthcare is successfully managed by private companies all around the world - even in Europe (the funding is organized by law but still the hospitals are private companies and half of EU countries have private health insurance companies). The horrors of publicly managed social media were already tested here in Europe too and we never want to go back.

[throwawaysea]

Social media is just a basic telecom utility service. Most of societal communication takes place on it. It’s fundamental enough that most individuals, businesses, celebrities, and government officials participate in it. I don’t understand the distinction you’re making - to me it seems fairly fundamental and it also seems like social media depends on network effects, which justifies regulating the biggest ones.

[adventured]

> Social media is just a basic telecom utility service.

No it's not, not even close. Facebook is very different from TikTok, Pinterest, Twitter, Reddit and Snapchat. They're quite obviously not some manner of the equivalent of an universal pipe or utility.

If your premise were correct, you'd be able to swap them out for eachother; you'd be able to just run TikTok on Facebook and nobody would care about the difference. Instead, none of them fulfills that premise of basic utility, none of them makes all of the other social media platforms possible or irrelevant (Facebook can't do what Pinterest does; Facebook can't actually do what TikTok does, even if it would like to; and everybody would notice if all the other social networks vanished, precisely because Facebook can't do what they do).

Facebook is less important thank people have been hyping it to be (for their own ideological agenda reasons). TikTok has more than demonstrated that, and the thriving nature of all the rest of the social media landscape has also nicely demonstrated that. In fact the only real problem is that Facebook owns Instagram, otherwise it'd be out there as another separate mega platform. Facebook also can't do what Instagram does, which is why they had to buy them and are terrified of having to spin it off (another case where Facebook is clearly not a utility).

Just because Facebook can potentially store the same bits that Instagram does, doesn't mean it can provide the same service (first of all, you can't get users to go along with that for all sorts of reasons). Those are two very different things. Otherwise Google would have successfully built a juggernaut social platform, instead of failing repeatedly at it.

[vorpalhex]

Most individuals and celebrities also eat sushi, but that doesn't make sushi a "fundamental right".