> and their obligation to not shut down or restrict dialogue or discussion.

We can have a social debate over whether it's desirable for Reddit and Twitter to shut down dialog or discussion, but that's very different than arguing about the 1st Amendment implications. We can say that it's bad for Facebook and Discord to censor WSB without trying to argue that it's illegal or that it's something that the government should stop.

Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook have a 1st Amendment right to decide what goes on their platform. It's not just that they don't have an obligation to host everything, the Constitution protects their right not to host everything. The reason they can censor WSB is because they have freedom of speech. This is a central "conflict" in the 1st Amendment: it guarantees both freedom to say what you want, but also freedom not to say things. It guarantees freedom of association for private entities.

Free speech advocates are constantly trying to balance those rights and figure out solutions that make it easier to speak without removing peoples/companies' fundamental right to decide what speech they host and who they associate with.[0] That's not always trivial to do, which is why knee-jerk reactions like the Fairness Doctrine are problematic -- they ignore that difficult balance and instead just try to force private platforms to be "fair". This is also why some of the current dialog about cancel culture is problematic to me. Yes, we can talk about whether these trends are healthy for a society, and that's a valid conversation to have. But fundamentally, complaining about people online and criticizing them is free speech. A lot of cancel culture falls into this area where it's not clear at all which part you could legislate or make illegal without violating the 1st Amendment in the process.

My personal opinion is that we should be cautious about handing control of our public communication to a small number of private companies -- in other words, it's not the freedom of association that's a problem, it's Internet centralization. Worrying about the power of platforms like Facebook is not the same as saying that nothing should be moderated. It's good, even essential, for communities to moderate. It becomes more of a problem when one or two platforms control large swaths of the Internet.

I'm personally less worried about Facebook than I am about AWS/Cloudflare/Apple. But it would be nice to have more competitors to Facebook, and there are a lot of ways that we could try to get more competition in the social networking space. Just a few things we could try:

- Antitrust (Facebook regularly buys competitors so it won't have to compete with them, we could put a stop to that)

- Adversarial interoperability (We could limit the CFAA and DMCA so that scraping content you own from Facebook was easier and more legal. It's a more complicated discussion, but this could help combat the "network effect" problem with new startups)

- Promoting decentralized alternatives that are easier to self-host (ie, Mastodon, Peertube, etc...)

- General education (teaching people to be cautious about making these private platforms essential to their lives, and to be more proactive about seeking out Open alternatives)

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[0]: In my own "manifesto" about Internet rights, I try to explicitly call out both the Right to Communicate and the Right to Filter as being equally important (https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/). I think that both freedom of speech and freedom of association are essential, and neither really works well without the other.