They can't have it both ways. Optimising for engagement is a poisoned pill.

Sorting by most recent, you can only blame your friends for promoting extremism -- FB remains neutral.

But when FB promotes extremist/click bait content in your feed in order to maximize engagement and profit, they're obviously to blame for that.

I think you’re suggesting that the free speech argument is overblown when it comes to online discussion forums, and I agree with that - they can, should and do set house rules.

The problem that Facebook faces is that it has become bigger than government, and so people expect it to obey similar rules regarding the protection of free speech, but Facebook does not have the power to make actual laws, so it is not required to protect free speech on its platform. Free speech is intended to protect democracy from governments that would enact laws to limit dissent. It is not relevant to Facebook.

The argument that a product whose business model is based on artificially weighting communications between disparate groups for profit and engagement should protect peoples right to inject whichever provocative messages they want into it in the name of free speech seems like a perversion of the principal to me, because the result is an erosion of democracy and human rights as we have seen.

They absolutely should ban people for posting stuff that doesn’t align with their brand, and in a free market those people can find another forum for discussion with more permissive rules. Preferably an open, decentralised network that does not rely on ad revenue or have any incentive to automatically promote the growth of groups of algorithmically selected like-minded individuals.

And yes, I am ignoring all the good things about FB here. I don’t believe Facebook has amounted to a net good for society, however good its intentions.

I agree but that wasn't the analogy I was going for, Facebook's (and Twitter's) main issue is the propagation of non-private communication. If the angry mob is meeting at your cafe and everyone in town knows they are meeting there and what they are doing then the microphones etc. are not required. The privacy issues are mostly orthogonal to the disinformation and bad-for-society stuff.

You pick a cafe. I'll pick the phone company. Would it be out of line to ask phone companies to reconsider allowing mobs to use their services?

(Let's temporarily ignore the legal position phone companies have - they are explicitly protected by the law and not held liable).

The phone company isn't calling me up and telling about about all the stuff the angry mob has been up to and inviting me to join in on their next conference call.

We can trade analogies. And figure out where Facebook should lie, on the spectrum of analogies.

There is so much to say about this and its just been accepted. It IS a new communications medium, but very unlike those before it. Its a medium that allows rapid propagation of both information and misinformation. Its sold as a family-friendly media to connect with those you love and care but ends up as a firehose of targeted ad consumption. To dismiss the power of this new communication medium by treating it "just as a new newspaper" is exactly where you are wrong.

You could literally say the exact same things about the postal service.

I don't think so. Its the "rapid propagation" part that makes it different from the postal service.

That being said, Facebook's entire mission statement is to "connect the world" and I think you can make the argument that there are some people, especially all the strangers of the world, that shouldn't be "connected" whatsoever and yet Facebook encourages these kind of connections every single day, although I do think they've realized their mistake and pulled back a little (getting rid of the trending news section and the cesspool of user comments that go along with them).

I always thought forums and message boards were the best part of the Internet. This site in particular (HN) is a great example where people explicitly went to discuss things with a somewhat similar group of people. I'd like to see Facebook embrace the "Groups" feature more, to encourage people to find smaller groups of like-minded people that are interested in having a discussion instead of public comment posts that devolve into a bunch of random strangers shouting at each other. I also like the idea that "Groups" can be decentralized from a moderation point of view. There is no way, as large as Facebook is, that they can centrally moderate the entirety of human thought across all languages and cultures they participate in.

Newspapers already had sufficient scale to start major wars, prop up and/or tear down governments, etc. And, while we may blame those newspapers, should we also blame the companies that manufacture printing presses? Direct mail can be used for similar things; should we blame the USPS?

"The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century."

-Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication

See also:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gutenberg_Galaxy

You seem to be either (intentionally or for the sake of argument) excluding a lot of relevant context in your arguments to make Facebook look similar to a printing press.