I agree. It's strange to me that a common reaction to the premise that Facebook is more powerful than government is to say, "welp, guess we need to codify our free speech rights within our new Facebook government" rather than "Facebook can't be allowed to be that powerful."

Because what many people making that argument want is for Facebook (et al.) to remain as powerful as they are, but be compelled by law to use that power to publish speech against their will.

I would prefer if Facebook and its properties withered away from disuse but regardless, if the new public squares are privately owned digital spaces, it is still important to maintain the principles of free speech. Disinformation as a weapon complicates things as well.

Saying "can't be allowed" is easy. Actually fixing it - without making the situation worse by making the government even more powerful and intrusive and not actually achieving any increase in freedom - is much harder, and nobody offered how to actually do that yet.

Well I agree with you, but considering the corporate state merger we are seeing today (we now know elected can officials directly instructed Facebook as to whose accounts to ban), we have to do some real politik.

I am 100% behind any attempt to break up Facebook and Google, but given that they are de facto the government (just see how many ex googlers have high bureaucratic office), this seems as likely as the feds voting to reduce their influence.

The power differential between govt and industry doesn’t seem to address the root issue, which is the power differential between individual humans and industry and/or govt.

If you imagine individuals at less power than government and industry today, then you take industry and cut their power in half, their power now sits closer to that of individuals than it did before.

That depends. What happens to the industry power? Does it go back to individuals or does it accrue to the government?

As far as I’m aware, Facebook and Apple do not have a standing army yet.

Neither does the Supreme Court, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful.

Framing FAANGs as entities contra governments as a whole doesn’t really capture the relationship, which has evolved something more akin to the checks and balances that exist between branches of government.

Because they don't need to?

The argument that social media companies are more powerful than governments is fundamentally undermined if social media companies don't actually have any of the powers traditionally ascribed to governments (such as a monopoly on violence) and are, themselves, subject to the authority of governments.

Twitter banning Donald Trump's account doesn't make them more powerful than the US government, for instance. MacDonald's serves billions every day, but no one calls them a superpower.

The power to censor speech and control the spread of information is one of these traditional government powers and these companies routinely use it. In a democracy, control of information is as good if not better than an army. Installing a new government by force would get the international community pissed at you - the UN might even wag a finger at you angrily. Winning a democratic election because the people's beliefs were groomed by an algorithm in full control of which information they see and which they don't is something nobody will even know happened. Your government is as legitimate as any other and your power isn't much less absolute than any military dictatorship.

I'm not saying this will happen - it surely won't. But it could.

What will and already does happen is that companies won't replace governments with their puppets, but use their power over information to extract more and more value from the people and to get existing governments to make it easier for them.

Violence is a crude tool used by empires of the past. Even governments are starting to abandon it. Access to and control of information is the name of the game now. Governments need to hack, deceive and threaten to get information, but we've already voluntarily put these tech companies in control of ours. Governments have already lost on that front.

They do... The united States of America's army. The federal government is slowly becoming an arm of big tech. Look at how many ex googlers and Facebook execs are taking government positions. Look at how califorinia officials are instructing Facebook what to do.

This is like claiming the epa has no army ... technically true but completely missing the larger context