These networks have been curated from the get-go, for no reason other than to control spam. Then, to keep people hooked, they emphasized virality and controversy. These aspects make them quite unlike a town square.

Our situation is even better than this, the entire internet is our town square, anyone can spin our own metaphorical soap box online and say whatever we want, and the entire worlds internet connected public can hear us if they choose to do so.

Even worse.

So this is different from walking past a demonstration or assembly in the city, it is more of an Inception movie-like warping of the entire city to bring everyone closer to these peoples voices.

Actually, a city square does exactly that, amplify your voice to all those that pass. The difference is that there are many city squares to stand in, whereas there are only a handful of social media companies. The problem here is Facebook's monopoly power, not the medium of communication.

I’m just not sure this holds up to any kind of scrutiny. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of forums online where people can speak.

It’s a problematic analogy anyway, Facebook is not a public space, if we’re going insist on applying a real world physical analogue, they would be much closer to a city’s incredibly popular nightclub with a stage, which of course would never be required to give extremists or provocateurs free-reign of their equipment or stage. But even this analogy has problems.

I think the real argument is whether or not a company is free to associate its brand with whatever it likes.