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>the proposition that certain social media sites actually should obey the "company town" precedent.

This only follows if you believe you're under an obligation to use social media.

>It's really never before happened in history where a private company has become the mediator and facilitator of discourse involving millions of people simultaneously.

This depends on what you mean. On the one hand, up until ~30 years ago, discourse involving millions of people was impossible. So in one way you're correct. On the other hand, media companies of all kinds have historically had a huge level of control over what people see. When the only form of communication was the town crier, he controlled what you heard. When we added printed paper, the people with the press had outsized control over the media. And the barriers to entry were much higher then: I can spin up my own website in an hour. Your average person couldn't afford a printing press.

>This almost infinitely scalable many-to-many communication property of modern social media makes it feel much more like a public space than newspapers, TV, and radio ever did.

What public space offers infinitely scalable many-to-many communication? Public space is distance limited, these platforms aren't. Just because these platforms chose not to heavily regulate the content doesn't preclude their ability to ever do so in the future, nor does it make a comparison to a theoretical public space that never existed any more valid.

> What public space offers infinitely scalable many-to-many communication? Public space is distance limited, these platforms aren't. Just because these platforms chose not to heavily regulate the content doesn't preclude their ability to ever do so in the future, nor does it make a comparison to a theoretical public space that never existed any more valid.

You're still extremely limited on Facebook and Twitter by natural space and time constraints. Just because these take a slightly different form and aren't based on physical distance between communicating parties doesn't mean that communication on the platform is just completely unfettered.

So "infinitely scalable" does not mean that each person can actually consume all content produced by all other people. That's not possible in all current iterations of social media and presumably is fundamentally unachievable. Rather, it means the system can scale to an arbitrary number of producers and consumers, each of whom is still subjected to natural physical constraints, whether those be determined by physical location, screen space, the loudness of your voice, the speed at which you read, the speed at which you type, etc.

I believe that with network effects far more pervasive as things move online, monopoly/competition law needs to play a greater role. The basic idea is that any party that controls more than (TBD) percent of a significant market/distribution channel/medium/etc. (significance by total $, total # of users, etc., TBD) loses the right of a small, private party to unilaterally ban users.

If you create a FaceBook competitor, identical in every way except dozens of other users instead of hundreds of millions, it would not be a realistic alternative. Likewise for Twitter, or real estate listing services, and a growing number of other things where it's not the tech so much as the other users.

When network effects dominate, as is so common online, and users gradually lose the realistic ability to just switch to a different service with terms they like more, service providers must also lose the ability to impose any terms THEY like and to refuse service to users. What they can charge, who they can ban, etc., should become matters governed by regulators.

There's no objective, consistent way to define a "significant market" for highly differentiated products. What market is Facebook in? Is it all web sites? All mobile apps? All media? All social media? All communication tools? Those categories are totally subjective and arbitrary.

As someone that refuses to use Facebook / etc... I still see the free speech issue in this.

Imagine it from this perspective; whom can a telephone company decide to deny service?

If they have stepped beyond merely disagreeable speech (and I agree, it's often very disagreeable) where was that line crossed so that our court system might process their transgressions?

Telephony is a commodity service with a legally defined market. The rules for such services are irrelevant when deciding how to regulate non-commodity Internet services.

Legal status is frequently based on reasonableness. When you have a service with hundreds of millions of users, you already have a reasonable argument for "significant" even if the lower bound of significance is fuzzy. If you then survey the users of a giant system regarding practical alternatives, and the answer is overwhelmingly "even if there were one, I couldn't switch to an alternative offering the same features and price, because it would lack the critically important feature that everyone uses this one," you have a reasonable, practical, realistic means of identifying some of the entities that are too powerful, relative to their users, to be allowed to just do whatever they want with prices, who they will do business with, and any number of other policies.

If you want complete freedom to refuse to do business with users for whatever reason you want, charge anyone whatever you want and change as you like, and so on, you can have it as long as your users can reasonably exercise similar freedoms by doing business with alternatives. If network effects remove those options from your users, they should remove them from you, too.

> This only follows if you believe you're under an obligation to use social media.

Were the town residents in Marsh v Alabama, required to inhabit the company town? I think the fact that they did is what made is a public space, regardless of whether they were required to.

I don't think that's quite right. The issue there is that the company town wanted to be an actual town- they were providing services, inviting people to move in (including people who didn't directly work for them), and generally saying "anyone who wants to can be here"- they were very explicitly trying to create "public spaces".

Facebook is not the same thing- people aren't moving there and people don't live there. I know we want to pretend that digital and physical are similar, but this particular case that everyone is citing was very specifically about the company towns and precedent afterwords has been pretty clear.

>it's increasingly true that sites like Facebook and Twitter actually are the primary space for public discourse.

That's probably true, but in my opinion the overall problem is the centralization of the web (and the internet at large), not the policies of these websites.

You won't convince me to play devil's advocate for white nationalist content on Facebook, I would however gladly embrace any effort to help make the web more decentralized.

And it's not like it's an unsolvable problem, bandwidth and hardware have never been cheaper and yet hardly anybody hosts their own content anymore. That's what needs fixing IMO.

"And it's not like it's an unsolvable problem"

No, it is not. But it is not a solved problem either. Self-publishing content has been tried. For years. And the reason we are where we are is not because hosting your own content is hard or expensive, it is because it has unsolved problems that social networks solve. How to consume content you want to consume? How to share your content with people you want to share with? How to build and manage an online community? You might say that aggregators solve the first problem and blogs solve the second one and forums solve the third, but all of these things existed before Facebook and other social networks. Having a unified platform for sharing content with people you choose and consuming content from creators you choose won the market against multiple single purpose services like blogs, forums, news aggregators etc. And Facebook wasn't the first, the "original" social network LiveJournal started out as a sort of a blog hosting service, yet simply by adding an ability to have "friends" and read a selective news feed from people you "friended" it became more popular than any other blog service of its time. Facebook and other social networks are doing exactly the same and they are successful because they provide functionality that does not exist otherwise.

Could this problem be solved? Could we have a decentralized content hosting, yet keep all the benefits of a centralized service like Facebook? Most likely. But it is not a problem that already has a solution.

Considering how "corporate friendly" the SOTUS has been, and how often they think that corporations are people who have their own free speech rights (particularly with regard to spending money), I'm guessing they are not going to side with "free speech advocates" on this one.

The problem is someone can screenshot a Nazi Facebook post with the Facebook logo right there in bold blue and spam it across the internet as evidence that Facebook implicitly supports white nationalism (by giving it a platform).

I don't think there was ever an outcome other than the one we've seen - Nazis getting banned. The company town precedent doesn't make a good comparison in my head - this is Facebook content stored on their servers and printed on their timelines. I believe they should be allowed to control what appears in their timelines.

“The problem is someone can screenshot a Nazi Facebook post with the Facebook logo right there in bold blue and spam it across the internet as evidence that Facebook implicitly supports white nationalism (by giving it a platform).”

I don’t think this is a real problem unless Facebook follows its current path where they are acting like they do endorse content on their network (because they don’t ban it).

A nazi can take a picture holding a coke bottle and spam it everywhere. That’s not coke endorsing them. But if coke decided to only sell to “cool people who weren’t nazis” and then NAMBLA sends out coke pictures people might get confused.

How is that a problem? It's true regardless of any policy of Facebook's.

You can get a screenshot of anything in a web browser. Screenshots of a browser have no evidentiary value at all.

In interesting conclusion of your suggestion: people may have to start capping user sign-ups to their site in order to maintain free speech rights:

    if (users.count.toString.length > 7) {
      return response.send(noMoreSignupsAtThisTime) }

    if (users.count > 9999999) {

  if ((ln(users.count) / ln(10)) > 7) { ... }

    if (users.count > 1e7){ ... }

  ... >= 1e7 ...

If we want to preserve (users.count > 9999999).

Is this not a highly inefficient implementation of an integer comparison?

Sure. I was going for explanatory, not efficient.