I'm not sure that effects what Twitter can do at all though.

Could Twitter designate itself (or a subsidiary) as a Political Action Committee so they can deplatform (or promote) whomever they like?

We get a lot of problems otherwise.

Second, they should be careful not to let the door hit them on their way out. They'd lose the money, E.U. gains getting rid of Facebook (and gets the chance to grow its own, open, alternative).

A social-media lose - EU win situation if there ever was one...

How do I qualify to have it be mandatory for broadcasters to carry my spot? I assume running in the election isn't enough?

That's ok, I'm pretty sure there's nothing forcing us to take that into account now

Laws don't exist because of this or that physical necessity. A physical necessity might encourage us to make a law, but in general laws exist because people (or at least, the legislative body) wanted them and can have them enforced. There's no physical necessity that says children should not work in factories, for example. They very well could in the 19th century (and well into the 20th, even in the USA). We just willed it as unacceptable and voted it into law.

So whether fairness doctrines where initially made because of limited time/space on tv, is neither here, nor there. A law could enforce it for any website that operates as a journalistic website, or is above a certain size, etc.

But even under the "law exists because of limited resource" model, the argument is flawed. Specifically:

>By contrast Internet bandwidth and sites are effectively infinite so there's no need to force access to any particular platform. Just use a different one, we have lots to choose from.

That's also neither here, nor there, as some platforms are more dominant than others.

The fact that politician X can get on Facebook, while Y cannot because FB doesn't let them, can already influence elections to the point of election fraud -- even if Y can still open a Tumblr or run their own webpage. It's where the eyeballs are that matters, and "viewer capture" is still a limited resource (that's the same thing that FB and co sell to advertisers: that they are the place where most people are).

And of course this setup (allowing X, disallowing Y candidate) can be leveraged as a mean of influence, from FB or from some country that controls FB for its foreign interests, or be sold as a service to the highest bidder "we advertise you, and disallow your opponent". The deal can be made under the table, if needs be.

Such a law is perfectly reasonable and doable, even if it explicitly regulates only a specific part of social media (say, the top-dogs of user engagement like FB, YT, Twitter and co, and not the long tail, e.g. some random blog or Diaspora).

> This analogy clearly doesn't hold up. It's more like a very successful private broadcast channel, but where making an effective public broadcast channel is too difficult for the government, so we pretend that the private channel is "like a public channel".

I think the analogy does hold up. Society limits private property rights all the time for the public good, and that's a good thing.

For instance my private property has drainage and utility easements that allow others to use to for the public good. I don't even own all the property in the area. Theoretically I could go all "muh private property" and demand the government spend a bunch of money to divert water around my land and remove the easement, but that would be silly and wasteful.

Right not we're in a situation where a too few companies control too much of the internet mass media landscape. If that's not remedied with something like antitrust breakups, some kind of "social media access easement" legal framework may be worth looking at.

It's more like a publicly traded company owning a really popular street or city. And these aren't just any cities, more like capital cities (or close to it). But this company still answers to the state. In reality this company owns and operates streets/cities in every country. Hence answers to every State and each of their laws.

Facebook and Twitter don't actually have free speech themselves. We pretend they do, but if they actually tried to enact a strong opinion into their business, banning some large arbitrary group, not just small disruptive minorities. States would just reverse that and say it's unlawful to deny, let's say, all X or Y countries citizens. Or all of Washington.

They are functionally a State apparatus. There's a reason why Facebook and Twitter are blocked whenever a country is in upheaval. But is kept around even in quite oppressive countries. I'm just saying we need to be honest about these State company hybrids.