Not the case. 96% of americans have a cell phone: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

22% of americans have had a twitter account: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...

I'm talking about social media in its entirety, not a single provider of it. Twitter/Facebook/Whatsapp have billions of users and would be treated as a single class of service.

> Your ISP and phone provider are private/non-state-owned entities too.

Yep, and they can also terminate your service for any reason they choose.

I don't think this is true, and even if it were it would be something everyone except literal fascists would oppose.

This isn't true in text, but national service providers very well could terminate someone for 'violating' their acceptable use policies and, unless they make a huge stink about it that gains state-wide or nation-wide attention, nobody's going to look too deep into why you were terminated. Maybe fining a small claims case could do something about it but I wouldn't count on it.

How about a world where corporations have regulations that serve the public?

> And social media is now at the same level as phones and internet.

Okay. That doesn't mean a whole lot at the moment.

The ISPs that allow you to even access Twitter at all are quite deliberately not regulated to this extent, so there's a lot of work to do before we can say that Twitter, of all things, is somehow a public utility without First Amendment rights.

How the "public" uses the service is irrelevant; the legal regulations are all based on what the service is.

Social media is fundamentally different from ISPs and other utilities- there are some protections and restrictions under section 230 (for now) but number of customers does not a utility make.

Public usage is how regulations and legislation are determined. Making social media a public utility is the point of the discussion here.

No, use of public space (spectrum, running wires to homes) drives the regulation. If the wireless spectrum was unlimited, and power, tv, internet and phone lines didnt need to be run on public land to get to private homes, they wouldn't face anything like the regulation (nor be granted monopolies) like they are now.

> Your ISP and phone provider are private/non-state-owned entities too.

Even if we agree that they are the right comparators, there's a problem for using that pair as a reference for how online service providers should be treated, since phone providers have a strong neutrality mandate and ISPs have none, so it basically provides no guidance whatsoever.