At some point, the political leaders of the world are going to have to take a side. Either online social networks are publishers, or they are common carriers, or they are something else and that something needs to be defined with sufficient clarity for everyone to know where they stand and what their rights and responsibilities are.

If the social networks are to be considered publishers, they can properly be held accountable for the information they propagate. That has to remain true whether the information is blatantly untrue political propaganda and climate change denial and anti-vaccination conspiracy theories or child abuse images and calls for violent protest and revenge porn. But the services also have to have full editorial rights to go along with that responsibility, and if the biggest loudspeakers on the planet choose, for example, not to propagate someone's political speech during an election campaign because the operators of those services don't like the politicians, that's their right.

Alternatively, if the services are to be considered common carriers, we go to the other extreme. They aren't responsible for anything transmitted over their network, whether good or bad. They are a mere conduit for information, no different to a phone service or postal mail or the crazy guy shouting in the pub at the end of the night or the Internet itself for that matter. They have to be impartial, including passing on material they don't necessarily like or agree with, without interference or comment. But then the services shouldn't be forever accused of not doing enough to combat whatever this season's political Big Bad is, regardless of the cost or even technical practicality of doing something else about that issue. Censorship is not their responsibility, and enforcing laws against criminal behaviour online is still the responsibility of government through normal law enforcement agencies and judicial processes.

Those are the two classical models for big data shifters within most of our legal systems today, at least in the relatively democratic West. If governments want a third model instead, the politicians need to own the issue for once and actually say what they want so the tech firms can do it (or stop trading, or relocate to a more favourable environment, if what is demanded is too unreasonable or unrealistic). But of course then the frequent contradictions in political comment on these networks would be undermined and they could no longer be turned into the fall guys for everything bad that happens online so politicians who haven't managed to deal with difficult issues can save face.

I am no big fan of any of these social networks, and I do personally think that much stronger regulation of big tech firms is long overdue, for the benefit of all the ordinary people whose lives are affected by them. But I also believe in fairness and transparency, particularly when it comes to who is legally required to do what and who is legally responsible for what. It's really tiresome to see politicians who wouldn't know an encryption algorithm if you handed them a paper with the algorithm's name in inch-high letters on the cover trying to lecture representatives of businesses that, for all their many failings and problems, are at least doing something that some real people find useful.