The issue is that when a platform outsources its censorship (“moderation”) to a third party that it still controls, rather than a third party that is actually perceived to be neutral by most people, then you create distrust which further fuels conspiracy theories. Also a conspiracy theory may actually be true. Jeffrey Epstein was not discussed during the 2016 election aside from a few fringe articles. It was too toxic for mainstream to touch. And everyone in Hollywood knew about Harvey Weinstein and even joked about it. These topics were covered up only for so long. Today there are lots of insane and farfetched theories being floated. But the theories being censored today that are indeed based in reality, will eventually become common knowledge and the censors will be implicated in the coverup thereby harming their trust.
Discussion, debate, argument, evidence, analysis lead us towards truth. Mute only appears to work and can be a useful political tool for only so long.
Today our public forum is virtual, but still a public forum. Trump wasn’t allowed to block certain followers because of their right to be in the forum and hear from their president.
So the question is whether governments will acknowledge this fact and limit the power of our big tech group communication platforms and enforce transparency and non-biased appeals process. Or will they cede total control of our public forums to Big Tech out of short term political convenience.
I don't disagree with your point but it isn't relevant to mine.
I'll only add that it's going to be difficult as hell to stay on topic as FAANG pushes back against attempts to deal with their monopoly practices. Uber and Lyft effortlessly destroyed the original meaning of "ride-sharing" for their own interests. Expect Google, Facebook, and Twitter to put all their weight behind narrowing the meaning of free speech to simply mean ensuring everybody has equal access to be manipulated by their commercial blackboxes.
But by that time almost no-one would care. And this is probably what they're counting on.
Having said that, I think if FB were to stop doing that, some other social network would, and would replace FB the way they replaced MySpace. So again, I think the current "we want one social network for everyone" situation, inevitably produces this kind of behavior.
But, I agree with your point, and it is a good one.
True.
But we should be explicit here-- FB isn't some neat, nerdy social graph software that just happened to get really popular, like git for regular people or something. They have a business model to shake up their social graph to maximize engagement, and the implementation achieves this by keeping everyone maximally mad as hell at each other. It spreads conspiracy theories efficiently. It and its users are easily exploited, and they continue to be exploited by any nation-state, nefarious actors, or even just some dude looking to make a buck spreading fake news. That all feeds into the same destructive behaviors for the users as the system desperately tries to keep them engaging more and more. Facebook's own software and UI exacerbates these problems.
With that starting point in mind, I agree with your 1, 2, 3, and 4 above. But this is less like email having to deal with new sets of problems as it scaled to the entire world. It's more like a drug cartel trying to figure out the maximum amount of their fundamentally destructive product they can sell before the government finally decides to comes in and break up their enterprise.