They'd better start acting like neutral carriers before government decides it for them. I totally get (and enjoy) the position that a private company can do whatever they like, but there is a scale at which you've enabled a platform with wide enough reach for enough people that restricting its use will be regarded as stifling speech by the only people who matter and who are more than capable of compelling you.

To be fair, the position of most governments is that Facebook isn't doing enough to censor fake news, hate speech, drug selling etc. I don't think having the government step in is going to fix any of these problems.

So if I want a non-neutral carrier, I have to go to a niche social network?

Forcing channels like Facebook to be neutral carriers only makes sense if they're a natural monopoly, which they aren't.

Arguably, due to the network effect, social networks like Facebook are natural monopolies / oligopolies. Niche networks function in a way that relies less on network effects to have value to users, e.g. it doesn't matter if all your friends aren't on Hacker News.

What scale is that? As far as I know, within the US, fox has wider reach than Facebook, and it's under no such obligation, and the US is perhaps the only nation that's going to force the definition of free speech you propose on Facebook. Europe certainly won't.

There are currently realistic alternatives to fox for anyone.

The same cannot be said for Facebook or Google at the moment even if some of us prefer Google+, HN, Twitter and Duckduckgo personally.

(That said Duckduckgo can go mainstream soon for what I know and Google+ is IMO constantly one or two good and well timed moves away from eating Facebooks userbase.)

> But Facebook is not a worldwide communication channel.

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc are de facto worldwide communication channels. The degree to which they are the totality of communication is a function of their popularity, and this is the reason why it is so desirable to control speech on these platforms.

We've asked you quite a lot to please stop posting flame-y ideological, political, or nationalistic comments. It's not happening, so we've banned the account. If you'd like to use the site as intended please email [email protected].

Look at the tweets in the last days from Trump regarding Omarosa...

Personally, I'm disgusted that twitter is the official medium of the POTUS.

It seems like Twitter is a good thing. It’s great that politicians and leaders and communicate directly with the public. In the old days, it got filtered through anointed gatekeepers that have the ability to filter and interpret based on their “angle.”

I actually debate with friends about this.

Yes, it is good to have more transparent insights into what the POTUS is doing. I just think that Twitter being an official policy platform for the country is concerning. Further, I think the impulsive and childish nature of the current POTUS should be severe cause for alarm.

I think it actually speak volumes about those who surround the POTUS and what a poor job they do as "handlers" -- shouldn't we have far more professionalism at that level?

But to your point, it was previous that this made it easier to spin the angle that the public sees...

It just makes me lose faith that anyone at the supposedly most elite positions really know what they are doing - they all seem so incompetent and looks like idiots, and it makes me want to acquiesce to their authority even less. Basically, it undermines and de-legitimatizes the power structure.

He should run an activitypub compatible Twitter clone (Mastodon/pleroma) at social.whitehouse.gov or something.

Are you sure it's the medium you're disgusted with?