By eyeball-hours, Fox is much bigger than Twitter among American audiences. Viewers tune into it for hours, on a daily basis.

What kind of regulation is it subjected to? It doesn't have to be neutral, and it has a legally-tested right to lie, and mislead. And that's for first-party content directly produced by it.

Do you have a quote on eyeball hours? Fox at most gets 2-3 million viewers at prime time. Twitter has hundreds of millions of users and their reach exceeds even their membership, as Tweets often drive narrative on many other platforms.

You can read the order. Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act set out provisions protecting internet service providers from liability for obscene, lewd, etc content on the basis they are a neutral platform (like an email provider) and not an active arbiter and curator of content published on their page. The law clearly states it's protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material (lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessive violent, harassing, etc). Not for editorial protection. Not for arbitrary enforcement of TOS.

Major networks regularly quote Twitter. I would hate for Twitter to become an echo chamber like Fox news.

So you suggest the government gets to decide, through your proposed regulatory agency.

Looking forward to an army of bureaucrats making sure every tweet is kosher, then? An agency will last longer, with staff that lasts longer, than any single presidency.

Sounds like a nightmare scenario for an "un-PC" asshole like Trump.

I'm suggesting it has the same rules as a public square, which is what Twitter is. No incitement to violence, no obscenity etc but otherwise free.

You should realize those restrictions you suggest are regulated and enforced by the government and are applied inconsistently all the fucking time. Just look at how various different demonstrations in the last 5 years have been treated, and how some of them have ended in violence.

I really don't think you, or Trump, understand the ramifications of what you're asking for. You have this ideal, naive view of what's allowed in "public squares" that doesn't seem to match what happens.

See: Trumps belief he was persecuted by other government agencies. Which he complains about on Twitter. Which would now be answering to a... government agency...

If Twitter were a physical space there would be regular violence that would have to be shut down. The role of the government is to break up the violence if it occurs.

Again, that's a very idealistic "role of the government" that assumes there will never be anyone who interprets what should and shouldn't be allowed differently from you, or in a way that harms you.

And then, once that happens, now you have no recourse - even if you build another platform, it ends up controlled by the same regulators.