When they can influence billions and shape elections, it's time to seriously review their power. This is how we treat ISPs and phone providers today, and social networks of a certain size should be considered in the same class.
Undersea cables, phone lines, and the radio spectrum are critical communications media. Private web sites with selective publication criteria by way of their content moderation policies are not.
Should private companies have any regulation at all? Should oil companies avoid pollution? Should ISPs ensure quality of service? Should medical companies ensure safety? Why is it that trillion-dollar companies that are larger and more powerful than anything else before should not be regulated when it comes to something as crucial as our freedom to communicate?
I find it ironic that another major HN story today is another instance of Google wiping out someone's account without any recourse, erasing their online presence and decades of data. Is that the new normal? Megacorporations ruling our lives without reason or appeal?
The world has changed. Social media is no longer just a website. It's communication fabric with network effects larger than entire nations that surrounds our lives. We either deal with it accordingly or risk losing much more.
The underlying physical infrastructure, sure, the underlying standards like the TCP/IP stack, DNS, Ethernet, etc, well those are too, but these are categorically not quite same as what you are arguing should also be included in that group.
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/28/arts/a-boycott-of-tv-adve...
You're dealing in fantasies from an obsolete era.
More people communicate over social media than phone lines today. Why is the former not equivalent to the later? Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey said that he believes social media is a human right - do you disagree with him?
Obviously Twitter is not because it has been down for about an hour now and life is going on just fine.
The critical question is if they ought to be allowed to wield that power unchecked, up to and including when that reach has progressed far enough to have real impacts on our political system, and so impacts on people's lives.
Remember, we're talking about what we'd like the law to be, not what the law is. These definitions are up for debate and redefinition.
News organizations have wielded this power for at least a century. Their decisions on what stories to publish obviously have political implications, and in some cases their editorial boards even explicitly endorse one candidate.
Facebook and Twitter are private entities, just like The NY Times or Fox News.
They don't create content as an organization and only facilitate communication, which is exactly why section 230 is being contested.
The First Amendment applies to everyone in the U.S.
This is not a strawman, I simply see no other way to interpret this comment.
Facebook and Twitter are just 2 of the biggest with many others like TikTok, Whatsapp, WeChat. It's the size and scope that should be used as a measure of when they cross over into public utility vs private project.
I can actually get behind no regulation for private companies, twitter can censor who they like as I can drive my favorite tank registered as my company vehicle and don't bother with taxes anymore.
I'm imagining someone who messes up badly enough to get banned from all those places and still somehow blames the stores rather than their own actions.
That’s exactly what antisemites say of Jewish expulsions.
Yeah, but it seems like FB and Twitter have been reviewing their power over the last four years.
They looked at the power of trolling-network, botnets etc to the influence elections. They basically triggered a circuit-breaker when a heavy hit-piece hit their networks.
Which is to say "the power of social networks" isn't just the power of the owners of the networks but also the power of groups embedded in the networks. Should these providers be fair brockers for all kind of manipulated viral content as well as for individual positions? Should they use their position of the ultimate kill switch to be the ultimate authority? I don't know but I don't think you put the most recent events as Facebook versus Organic Content - it's more Facebook versus Rupert Murdoch.