There was an argument to be made to treat phone companies like common carriers, I’m not entirely sure that was the best way to handle them, but it happened, and it was a good argument nonetheless, or at least well argued.

Social media isn’t like that at all. Social media proliferates and in different forms and it does so internationally with popular and unpopular opinions easily spreading like wildfire. I have no problem with the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world running their servers with the carte blanche of the private property owners that they are because what you and others perceive as a lack of options and alternatives looks more to me like there’s not a lot of options today compared to how many there will be 20 years from now.

Go look back at the history of the web, here’s an incomplete and not comprehensive list of sites and internet services which have existed, do exist, ceased to exist, got gobbled up by bigger fish and spawned smaller networks of their own and probably in some small way contributed to the political conscience of most Americans alive today and definitely not concerning ourselves with all of the countless web forums, Usenet groups, and mailing lists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_serv...

Classmates.com: 1995

GameFAQs: 1995

Newgrounds: 1995

ICQ: 1996

AIM: 1997

CaringBridge: 1997

Slashdot: 1997

Penny Arcade: 1998

Yahoo Messenger: 1998

BlackPlanet: 1999

Blogger: 1999

Fark: 1999

Kiwibox: 1999

LiveJournal: 1999

Metafilter: 1999

Neopets: 1999

Something Awful: 1999

Xanga: 1999

CrossFit: 2000

DeviantArt: 2000

Radio UserLand: 2000

Wikipedia: 2001

YTMND: 2001

Yahoo Groups: 2001

last.fm: 2002

Meetup: 2002

4chan: 2003

Gaia Online: 2003

LinkedIn: 2003

MEETin: 2003

MySpace: 2003

Second Life: 2003

Steam: 2003

WordPress: 2003

Digg: 2004

Facebook: 2004

Flickr: 2004

hi5: 2004

IMVU: 2004

PatientsLikeMe: 2004

RoosterTeeth Forums: 2004

TV Tropes: 2004

World of Warcraft: 2004

Yelp: 2004

Vimeo: 2004

Dailymotion: 2005

Google Talk: 2005

LibraryThing: 2005

Ning: 2005

Reddit: 2005

YouTube: 2005

CafeMom: 2006

Flixster: 2006

Goodreads: 2006

iLike: 2006

ReverbNation: 2006

Twitter: 2006

Chess.com: 2007

Italki: 2007

SoundCloud: 2007

Tumblr: 2007

Hacker News: 2007

Justin.tv: 2007

Academia.edu: 2008

GovLoop: 2008

identi.ca: 2008

Nextdoor: 2008

Formspring: 2009

Foursquare: 2009

Grindr: 2009

Pinterest: 2009

Quora: 2009

WhatsApp: 2009

Friendica: 2010

Instagram: 2010

Untappd: 2010

Duolingo: 2011

Fishbrain: 2011

I Had Cancer: 2011

Letterboxd: 2011

Twitch: 2011

Whisper: 2012

Google Hangouts: 2013

Slack: 2013

Vine: 2013

Voat: 2014

Yo: 2014

Discord: 2015

Periscope: 2015

Gab: 2016

Houseparty: 2016

Mastodon: 2016

Peach: 2016

micro.blog: 2017

Parler: 2018

So let’s break this down.

> Sure, there isn't a shortage of digital communication, but they are responsible for a large proportion of that communication and they hold the power of tilting democracies by choice of those in charge of the company or by seemingly random bearucratic decisions made by their employees.

No. We are responsible for our own communications and when we don’t trust the messenger, we encode our messages or we use a different messenger. We are also the ones responsible for the upkeep of our own democracy and the upkeep of the institutions which maintain it because it’s ours and our responsibility. Corporations, as it turns out, as organizations which represent the aggregate interests of their owners and employees, are also actors in aggregate within the framework of our democracy, much like name a group of three or more people.

How ten thousand people voted in one place or fifty-thousand voted in another isn’t Facebook’s responsibility, or Twitter’s, or Reddit’s, or Slack’s. It’s the responsibility of every single person who cast their own vote, which should be all of the people who cast votes in every election.

> They are a medium of information distribution.

They are a handful out of the millions of ways that exist to distribute information.

> They are a for profit business ruled by one individual that has extraordinary power. As a society, are we really supposed to just let them do whatever they want just because there are less popular alternatives?

They are dust. If our free speech depended on the whims of one Mark Zuckerberg and one Jack Dorsey, then we didn’t have free speech to begin with. Facebook and Twitter are critters of the last 20 years, there have been others, and there will be more like them, but also entirely unlike them.

The way people talk about social media companies today they make it sound like we need some sort of Social Media Public Commission to control the moderation policies and enforce the publication of government speech. We don’t, because we have what we need: competition and the many many technologies that enable it and a free flow of cash and labor and capital.

It’s disgusting to me how freely conspiracy theorists, socialists, PRC apologists and neo-Nazis can easily congregate and talk themselves up into a furor about seizing the means of killing the Jews before Bill Gates takes over the world and prevents Chairman Winnie the Pooh from leading us into glorious revolution, but that’s the mark of a free society that they can find a way and will always find a way. So is being able to tell the President and anyone else to get off your lawn and/or servers.