It’s a tricky one, but something that I repeatedly come back to is that publishers are regulated, but social media is a free for all. A newspaper can’t just make up something without consequences (in the UK), for example they may be sued for libel.

Social media companies, by contrast, can publish posts from their anonymised users that contain almost anything, and it is permitted. It can be racism. It can state that £300M a week could be spent on the NHS if only the UK would leave the EU. And those posts can be sent to millions of people without regard to truth or the damage they can do.

The classic response to this is “well, you can’t expect us to police such a large amount of content, it’s impractical” - a fair response - but then there’s a bit of sleight of hand from Meta et al: they conclude that they should therefore be allowed to broadcast anything a user shares. But an alternative conclusion is _well, then perhaps you shouldn’t be broadcasting inflammatory nonsense from any person/bot who posts_ and you have to find a new operating model.

It’s tricky because free speech is important, but I think we’ve seen enough times how dangerous, divisive, and destructive social media is. If there’s no way to prevent people and states from abusing it, then it probably shouldn’t exist. When the retrospective is written on the fall of America and the west, social media will be one of the key explanatory factors, along with hypercapitalism.