In the US, the 1st amendment grants private companies the right to police content within their purview. Preventing them from doing so is in itself a violation of the 1st amendment. Thus, in my opinion, the suggestion that private companies should NOT police content, despite their explicit 1st amendment right to do so, is antithetical to the 1st amendment.
In the US, companies get 1st amendment protections as if they were people, but don't get any of the liability due to SEction 230 of the communications decency act.
Giving companies 1st amendment rights was ridiculous, but then giving them protections beyond the 1st amendment that no normal person gets was giving them too much power to control speech in society.
Repealing 230 would force companies to moderate much more heavily so as to avoid liability. So if the goal is to reduce moderation, repealing Section 230 won't solve that. Not giving companies 1st amendment rights is very troubling to me because ultimately a company is just a collection of people with a governance structure. Compelling a jewish coffee shop owner to allow someone to post anti-semitic notices within their business would be an immediate consequence.
I don't see any easy answer here. I'm as uncomfortable with the amount of influence companies like Facebook yield as anyone but most of the "easy" solutions would, in my opinion, make the situation far worse.
Section 230 actually protects two groups, "interactive computer services" (Facebook, Twitter, et al) and users from liability wrt content that they get from others.
The "they can't do it at scale" argument applies to ICS, but why shouldn't users be subject to liability when they echo something?
We live in an approximation of the infinite monkeys with typewriters. It's relatively easy to find someone judgement-proof who has written pretty much anything that you'd like. Folks with huge audiences can use that to be as defamatory as they'd like without risking liability.
So the 1st amendment's wrong. Fix it somehow. Landline telephone companies are obliged by their terms of licence to serve all customers in their coverage area (i.e they can't deny the KKK a landline.) There's precedent for forcing companies to provide a certain service. Just write a law. Find or invent a justification and write a law.
You can't, uh, just write a law that overrides the 1st amendment. It's in the Constitution. Any law that overrides the 1st amendment is unconstitutional by definition.
I figure - at least for the US - that that's the inevitable conclusion. Not necessarily FB, perhaps a govt service that's created along the lines of twitter, simple and straightforward.
The internet is the de-facto public square, there has to be a public forum that's under the control of the public.
