And even if you take the shorter view, there are still more places for people to discuss them. Facebook and Twitter didn’t even exist until the mid-2000s and the Internet has been readily accessible since the late 1990s.
to my generation, this is much more poorly framed by arguing whether Facebook is comparable to a pre-internet private establishment, than it is framed by the internet being simply the air that we breathe, an ether in which sound naturally vibrates and which trying to legislate the dynamics of should seem equally ridiculous.
There will always be a place for people to express themselves, but it may not always be as convenient as some would like. But the Constitution does not require convenience or free amplification services.
This is the entire rub, though. Exactly how convenient it is should be a matter of primal importance to the root relationships between citizen, state, and countrymen that the founders found and advocated for. Beyond the momentary mire of the current legal/political order, one feels that all citizens should have some instinctual understanding and positive desire for the sort of healthy, dynamic, and free social order that we're all ostensibly (or increasingly just nominally) in support of as Americans. Whether this dynamic comes under repression from this type of entity or another is a flatly ridiculous non-sequitur (I'm positive that the founders had the same level of love for the East India Company as they did for the British crown)
Complicating this, the surrounding legal framework and precedents around computing technology is near-universally acknowledged to be in a state of completely hopeless shambles; every critical chunk of the system was designed and implemented in the 20th century, with the assumptions of 20th century media tech casted squarely into them. Exceedingly few TOS and EULA precedents have progressed an inch since the era of 1980s shrinkware tech. The "Congressional inquiry of big tech leaders" parade we continue to put on is a gigantic joke and a gross historical embarrassment. the DMCA and the CFAA routinely horrifies any sensible person that examines them for a couple of minutes.
So two things; while the current legal system collectively catches up to modern tech basics like "how to use an AOL modem", we should be direly concerned that a large portion of the country seems to have abandoned any personal sense of (first creeping, now a torrent) of the predictable horrors incurred under a tyrannical regimes that expressly suppress YOUR (God-given!) constitutional rights.
The second thing, of course, is that all this stuff eventually needs to get resolved in the tangible court of legal opinion. I have no doubt that Mr Torba's constitution claim will fail under our current legal system, and I generally accept the rebuke that the 'digital native' class haven't done enough of the aforementioned positive work themselves to outline how these new usages of these new technologies should harmonize with the constraints and institutional knowledge of the existing legal/political system, which has accumulated a ton of valid merit over its mostly-contiguous 250-year-long history.
At some point there's going to have to be a big palaver regarding one's fundamental right to own, operate, and make sovereign decisions (as a citizen subject to the constitution) about some part of their computing stack. Probably won't get resolved today, but I think Mr. Torba's response seems like a healthy statement to rally around.
Instead he argues that there should be a lot of newspapers, to accurately capture the growing audiences and government should not interfere in the growth of private speech
It was considered virulently anti-Liberty to use government to force a newspaper to print an opinion they disagree with, and that concept remains true today.
If Facebook does not wish to publish violent speech, they don't have to, just like the New York Times editors can choose, just like Fox News can choose, just like every "free speech" newspaper, news channel, or network can choose.
This is the essence of free speech, that the government cannot unfairly control your network and tell you that you can no longer choose what to publish.
It's sad that people are this against Liberty that they demand government forcibly control networks to allow whatever speech the ruling party currently feels is "free".
you can't simply switch off of Facebook the way you would drop a publication you dislike. the network effects keep everyone trapped in. i can't believe we're still having this asinine back-and-forth a full decade after we learned how natural monopolies form via the ordinary dynamics of social graph consolidation.
Metcalfe's law is a thing people, you can read about in on Wikipedia [1] and we can maybe start moving beyond a 1993 understanding of what an internet platform is.