At this stage 'private company yada yada yada' is wilfully missing the point of just how much Facebook is the social media entity for a good chunk of the world.
Maybe I'm stubborn or stupid but I fail to see the problem. What make you think Facebook should have the interest of their users at heart to begin with, except to attract more users? The users are not their customers, the advertisers are. And anyway, nobody is forcing anyone to use Facebook or any social media at all.
But the problem is that in practice, most people live on Facebook, and don't really care about any of this. This means that companies such as Facebook have a huge influence on what people see.
So the question really is, do we, as a democratic society, allow a single company to have such a big power over the opinion of the masses.
I don't have a proper answer for this, but that question is definitely there, regardless of the fact that people are not forced to use it.
To most users FB is absolutely a pure(ish) content exchange medium. They treat posting like sending SMS or what have you, an 'open' exhange, and not entirely unreasonably IMHO given 11+ years of precedent.
With that in mind today's event becomes significant. It rams home that FB is in control. And frankly that's new to most people!
Back when SMS was new, people treated it like it had time end delivery guarantees, even though it had neither, and messages could sometimes be delayed by 20 minutes or an hour. I even had a girlfriend accuse me of lying because of that.
That's why your ex didn't expect this 'SLA', because most of the time messages arrive practically immediately. And that's why most people don't expect Facebook to block non-spam, non-offensive content, because most of the time they don't.
It's so galling that legit opinions, which are well presented are trashed, just because they go against the direction of the polit bureau.
They should lose their immunity to lawsuits for user created content on their publishing platform.
They indisputably go to great lengths to control what you see ergo they are not simply facilitators.
Losing the immunity that they get by being a neutral platform, means that current content on FB, that they were previously not liable for, they would now become liable for.
For example, if a user posts something illegal on FB, then Facebook could be sued, even if they remove the content as soon as they became aware of it. (In the same way that the NYT is responsible for the content on it's writers).
Think about how phone companies have immunity from someone making illegal phone calls, and then phone companies becoming liable for damages that they previously were not liable for previously.
If you do filter, you’re supposed to lose that status - and then you become liable for what goes through your pipes.
I’m not sure there’s a similar legal concept for publishers.
The issue is that we don't know these criteria.