> but these companies very explicitly build to scale to be a sort of "town hall" and in doing so start having very large social influence the likes of which no one in history has ever had.

I think a bazaar or carnival is a better metaphor, since a town hall is a brick and mortar thing that lasts into posterity, whereas a social network is more temporary

> When they get to this scale there has to be extra responsibility here for the good of society as a whole.

Or people could just not use the service and move onto a different one? There's nothing permanent about the current social networks that are popular right now

> Or people could just not use the service and move onto a different one?

And people can just move to a different town, that doesn't stop us from having laws in place to guarantee rights in the current town.

You don't live in a town, though. You live in a privately owned-and-operated digital Olive Garden, which Elon Musk bought and made Confederate Flags mandatory or whatever. The town already decided that's okay a few hundred years ago, and reversing that stance would require pushing out all the restaurants people know and love.

you can beat any analogy to death, it doesn't mean you should.

Twitter is not analogous with a town, though. That's the thesis of my original comment, and I'm using your metaphor to explain how Twitter is not a public asset.

You've gotten lost in the weeds, my original comment said town hall (or town square if you prefer), and twitter IS analogous to a town hall where people gather to speak to audiences.

Town got pulled in when I pointed out that rights over speech wrt to these places still exist even though someone can move to a different town (to presumably gain access to a different town hall).

> And people can just move to a different town, that doesn't stop us from having laws in place to guarantee rights in the current town.

Towns are municipalities, twitter is a private company. The more I look at this metaphor, the less it makes sense

Well, yes and no. Yes, we need regulation if we want to hold people accountable for what they say online. No, in the sense that discriminating between large and small services is a bad idea. Scale has nothing to do with it, smaller services don't deserve to get off scott-free just because they didn't hit 'Twitter-scale' yet.

Again, the biggest issue here is the public misconception that Twitter (or any of the internet) is a benevolent platform. Legislation cannot change that.

Small platforms need to be held to a different standard. If you are the global village square platform worth 44 billion you get different rules compared to a wordpress blog with no traffic where you can make comments. Scale matters.

At least in America, that's not really how Rule of Law works. At least WRT individual rights like Free Speech.

That's a tautology, my original comment was pointing out that the law needs to be updated. Pointing out that the current law isn't like that is not interesting.

Rule of Law is simply the principle that we cannot apply legal concepts discriminately: https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-a...

Nobody is above the law, not the meek nor the mighty.

Someone should go tell that to existing utility companies so they can argue they can't be more highly regulated than other companies.

aka, we already have precedence for this sort of thing.

This is an idiosyncratic understanding of "rule of law." Laws in America routinely discriminate between small and large entities. For example, the FMLA only applies to companies with 50 or more employees.