I've seen the First Amendment used as an argument against the US government determining what should and shouldn't be moderated by private companies operating on private infrastructure serving private citizens. Unless we're talking about unprotected speech?
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that was your argument. That's not how I meant for you to interpret it.
I meant to get your opinion on whether the First Amendment would create a barrier for what you're proposing: government mandated moderation of protected speech on private platforms. You're talking about legislation and where to place barriers, so I thought you'd be interested in discussion. Sorry.
I think that private companies shouldn't own the public square. So long as we allow corporations to encapsulate social interaction, we will continue to fail at moderation.
I don't think that law is a really meaningful avenue to fix this problem. I do think that aggressive anti-trust action could help a lot, though. If we do want to use law, then I think the focus should be on punishment for facilitation of harm. We should be able to prosecute Facebook for hosting fraudsters and failing to moderate harmful content.
As it is, a tiny number of companies hosting the social activity of billions of people, and those companies have utterly failed to accommodate that reality with proportional moderation. The failure of Facebook to adequately moderate has already lead to genocide.
My greater dream is to replace centralized social networks and content moderation with a decentralized network of curated attestations.
