This is true, but also, the town squares were public places. Are you suggesting to nationalize Facebook?
Adding to this, maybe the best thing to do is to just fund a public social media site, where constitutional protections apply, and treat that as a virtual town square.
I would rather suggest something along the lines of this.
At a certain scale (user count), sufficient implicit selection of users and their content revokes section 230 rights. If you start implicitly removing specific viewpoints and topics it's no longer "user-generated content" and is now your content. Of course there have to be provisions for explicit content scope and spam, but that's roughly where I would start.
Can you explicitly tell me how you would codify that scale in law? And whatever you make the cap, what then is the incentive for a website to allow more users over the cap?
> Of course there have to be provisions for explicit content scope and spam
"Of course" they can moderate spam. Can you tell me how to objectively identify spam?
If I have a religious forum, and it passes the user cap, suddenly we have ourselves a public town square. Then someone comes in and starts saying "God isn't real!" several times in literally every thread. Is that spam? Because to me, it looks like an exercise of free speech, so you can't erase those messages. Certainly if someone was repeating that in a public space, we wouldn't silence them. By exceeding the user cap, that site would become a worse experience because you've severely limited moderation abilities by your proposed law.
If someone was repeating that in a public space, we probably wouldn't, but if he had a series of megaphones screaming that at everyone, ala spammimg everyone's convos, many societies have laws against just that. Much of law is already using a "reasonable man". Standard, so why not this one?
But a big reason behind all of this censorship on private platforms is that companies are trying to appease advertisers and customers downstream. It's already about money, because we're talking about private enterprise. Coca-cola doesn't want an ad appearing next to a comment promoting Nazism on your all-speech-must-be-allowed platform. It seems to me that forcing sites to have any and all content once they reach a certain size would do the opposite of generating revenue.
> If someone was repeating that in a public space, we probably wouldn't, but if he had a series of megaphones screaming that at everyone, ala spammimg everyone's convos, many societies have laws against just that.
This may or may not be legal in the US. But even if it is, I have a hard time imagining how we would define spam on the internet in a way that won't get subjectively abused and bring us halfway back to where we are now anyway.
How about this approach: force companies at the level of ISPs, domain name registrars, payment processors, and maybe cloud providers, to allow any legal content and not censor. That seems like infrastructure that's too hard to build from the ground up. Anything built on top of that, like a website, is free to act how it acts today.
Somewhere in between, communication is far too critical for private monopolies to have a stranglehold over.
Facebook and other such platforms have become a town square of sorts.
This idea that the principles that founding fathers championed, especially the Bill of Rights, should somehow be restricted only to what was possible with the technology of their time is pretty preposterous.