Whoa buddy, that's some pretty limited free market regulation thinking.
There's plenty of laws that only apply on certain companies, after n employees or x revenue. Should be pretty feasible to devise a law that applies to sites with more than n active users such as Facebook and twitter and the likes and not to your neighborhood forum.
How does that mesh with the original post's point?
If we have different rules depending on scale, how is it OK for the rules for large scale social media platforms to be impossible to comply with by large scale social media platforms?
Just say companies are counted as general social media after some % user penetration. Facebook with over 2 billion users is obviously a general social media site and should therefore have similar restrictions on what they can restrict as state governments, they can't be about some special topic with that many users. State governments do have the power to remove harassment and porn from public areas, so it could continue as is minus the political stuff.
I’m baffled that you see a simple easy to understand rule and think we should spice it up with a logarithmic curve.
The goal is simply to say that big social media companies must comply and small niche ones are ok. It is arbitrary. It’s also probably fine. Note it’s not 1M people in Minnesota. It’s 1M users anywhere.
Maybe there should be some sort of condition, like minimum MAU or something. Only regulate those that grow to be huge enough for many people to depend on them. This would exclude startups but would still apply to Facebook and Twitter.
I'm sympathetic to the argument that Facebook/Twitter/etc. are too large and have too much power for lobbying/influencing public discourse, although I think if anything making them a public utility would make that situation far worse as opposed to just breaking them up or something else to make the market more competitive
But also just because they are big platforms why does that give people a right to be on them? Is my speech less free because I have a smaller audience?
Why not introduce regulations for social platforms ? laws like "deplatforming is forbidden unless ordered by a proper court". I think it's a judge's job to decide on this kinds of issues
So then it potentially becomes impossible to create a startup that replaces existing social networks due to moderation requirements. Facebook and twitter got lucky they didn't get killed this way in the early days. This is similar to the criticism on the EU automated copyright violation detect requirements.
If moderation laws essentially make it impossible to build new mass platforms, then that creates a very strong case for having rights to have unrestricted open access to existing platforms, does it not? For example, the networks then wouldn't be able to issue lifetime bans at their discretion.
That wouldn't be a law that forces social media to exist, it'd be a law that forces those that do exist to be done right, at least in that aspect. There's a pretty huge number of laws of that sort.
I'm sure this happens but you should give some examples.
Also, many of these kinds of laws have clauses which make them only apply to social media with over a certain number of users (like 1 million or 100 million). These laws create other potential issues (mainly, government being able to control the popular narrative by "regulating" the most popular social media); but niche social medias are so niche (Twitter probably has more users than every small forum combined) that almost nobody is trying to regulate them in this way.
Who will enforce that responsibility? Who decides what's large enough?
> Letting one small group of people
What one small group of people? There are literally thousands of social media sites, and people are completely free to join or quit any one of them. If there were no competition in this space, I might be concerned. But just a few short years ago Facebook was unheard of and MySpace was the "monopoly".
Let customers choose. The customers are not one small group of people.
Find I find interesting is that there is little talk about actual attempts to provide solutions for this situation: Thee feediverse with mastodon, etc. or matrix.org.
To bring it down to a populist formula: Why not make a law that requires the interoperability/federation of social networks? We have laws that set requirements for restaurants... why not for social networks?
While the article doesn't mention it directly or indirectly, isn't this exactly what the social media giants would ideally want? Regulation might raise the `Barriers to entry` for any potential new social media site, if there was any chance of a new one coming up and taking a pie out of FB / Twitter, etc.
Well, yes and no. Yes, we need regulation if we want to hold people accountable for what they say online. No, in the sense that discriminating between large and small services is a bad idea. Scale has nothing to do with it, smaller services don't deserve to get off scott-free just because they didn't hit 'Twitter-scale' yet.
Again, the biggest issue here is the public misconception that Twitter (or any of the internet) is a benevolent platform. Legislation cannot change that.
I agree with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas that Congress should consider extending common carrier rules to large social media platforms and force them to carry all legal content. This would in a sense be a form of "compelled speech" in that those companies would have to expend resources to distribute communicates that their management finds objectionable, but at scale the marginal costs would be virtually zero. And they would still be able to give individual users the tools to filter out or block content that they don't want to see.
There should definetly be a requirement for a large mass of users.
Because otherwise FB, Tweeter and Google can push their views.
So a "must be a large social network or forum" must be a requirement in this law.
If Tweeter, Google or FB tried to push their agenda they could do it easily. Obviously fringe/small forums must be exempt.
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