[lxgr]

This interpretation seems like the exception proving the rule. If it were consistently applied, as you say, social media companies should logically also be required to carry all speech.

The reasonable democratic thing to do here would be to propose new legislation explicitly covering the protection of speech "on private property", pass it if deemed desirable, and just be done with it.

Of course, the problem with that is that such a law might be seen to actually contradict the First Amendment (compelled speech and all), so it would possibly have to be a constitutional amendment, and that's obviously not happening. I really have no idea on how to get out of this mess, yet doing so seems extremely important.

[somenameforme]

The point of the ruling is that 'private property' is not, in all cases, strictly defined by private vs public ownership. The more a property is treated in a fashion akin to a public property, the more the rights of the owners become constrained in a fashion similar to the 'normal' owners of public properties - the government. So for instance a similar case was Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck [1] in which somebody was trying to argue that public access TV should be considered a public space, which would lead to some rather interesting TV segments! It made its way the Supreme Court and he was ruled against, but only by a 5-4 split!

That's why I said that such protections will likely end up applying, sooner or later. The precedent for moving stuff from the private to public domain (in terms of protections of users) is quite clear and there's a willingness among the court to act on such, so this applying to things that provide free open access to far more people than any government can reach, and then try to act as their untouchable and unconstrained overlord by appealing to 'private property', is probably inevitable. Of course "inevitable" has no meaning. It could be 5 years from now, or 50.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Community_Access_Cor...