> But escaping legal consequences doesn't mean you're not conceptually responsible

But what is "conceptual responsibility"? The thing is, responsibility is not really an aspect of reality, it is almost completely a social convention. Reality only shows you causal connections, and causal connections certainly are an important factor influencing how we distribute responsibility, but they do not determine responsibility in any simple way. Power plant operators are among the causes of people dying of electric shock. Does that mean that we consider them responsible? Generally no--because we as a society have decided that people running power plants is an overall benefit to society and we can prevent accidents in other ways and a whole bunch of other reasons.

So, yes, you can have opinions about how responsibilities should be distributed differently, but I don't see any sort of "inherent responsibilities".

> Simpler and more reasonable for the media platforms to actually be responsible for what they say, and not maintain the fiction that they have no influence or effect on the messages they "transmit".

Well, first of all, I would object to the idea that because you have influence, you should necessarily be responsible. Telcos also have a massive influence in principle. But, I would argue for good reasons, we have decided that they are not responsible.

Now, that doesn't mean that I think Facebook should not be held responsible for anything. But the problem that I see is that this kind of regulation does not hold Facebook responsible for what Facebook is saying/doing. It instead holds Facebook responsible for what other people are saying, with an in incentive to prevent speech that would be perfectly legal (and ethically somewhere between fine and really important), while actually missing the goal (or is it even the goal?) of holding Facebook accountable for the power they are exercising.

> But the whole point of a modern media platform is that you don't need manual control; and indeeed you can never keep up with manual control. Algorithms will win against judges every single time, simply because no society can have that many judges

Well, but what does that mean then? It's not obvious how judges could keep up, so let's forget about human rights?

> If anything: the fact that they don't actively edit the contents of the messages only grants them more power, because it makes the control they do have opaque and hard to judge the impact of. I don't mean to imply they're intentionally Machiavellian or whatever here: it's just that indirect, hard-to-observe control is really hard to value.

Yes, I agree. And that is precisely why I think this kind of regulation is dangerous. It causes collateral damage, and it doesn't even address the actual problem. Suppose this actually made hate speech go away. Does that change anything significant about the opaque and hard to judge power of these organizations? Or doesn't it rather just help hide it even better?

If you will, we need to restrict underhanded manipulative speech of Facebook, not hate speech of its users. Or at least, if we restrict hate speech of its users, we shouldn't do it by incentivising Facebook to exercise more underhanded manipulative power.