> Because Facebook's product isn't their software, but access to the billions of people using it. They are effectively doing little more than acting as a carrier for access to society. And you can't compete against that.

But that's an argument against Facebook in particular, not against social media as a category.

Fundamentally, the problem is that we have allowed the modern "public square" to be in these spaces entirely owned by private companies.

What we really need is an open protocol for a federated social network that works very much like Facebook (so, not something like Mastodon, which is designed to work like Twitter, for instance—though it would probably be worthwhile to do the same with it) and have the government operate some public "reference servers" that anyone can join, while others can also operate servers that can federate with them. That way, you're still able to connect to people even if they're not on your particular server...provided they don't belong to a server that's been blocked from federation due to hate speech or something.