A few thoughts. I fully appreciate these costs, but am unsure the country would be better off. Facebook has allowed me to be in touch with long lost friends and classmates in unprecedented ways. It is like bringing the past forward into the present and actually can be joyous. https://twitter.com/johnddavidson/status/1266720089853870080

I would dearly miss this. It also allows me to engage in conversations about TV shows and other topics of interest to me, as well as groups of my neighbors I otherwise do not know. I learn much from this.

Twitter has given me a voice as a public intellectual, in ways that are difficult to imagine without something like it. I can speak to hundreds, perhaps many thousands, at low cost. It also allows me to have serious discussions of constitutional & legal issues with other experts.

In addition to interacting with nonexperts, I now can interact (for the better) with other academics and public intellectuals far better and on a more personal level than would ever before have been possible. I don't just pontificate, I learn a lot from these interactions.

And these are all in addition to having a personally-curated news feed from which, should I care to, I can learn what's happening far faster than by any other news medium. And by following many with whom I disagree, I also instantly get the other side of every issue.

This column ignores or discounts ALL these personal and social benefits enjoyed by me and millions of others. True, there is a coarseness and ugliness on social media that I am constantly mocking. This can partially be addressed by blocking on both platforms.

Having said this, I think the power enjoyed by Twitter and Facebook to stifle political views with which their faceless employees disagree is the type of "private power" that progressives would inveigh against if it was happening to them to the same degree.

Precisely because of the benefits it provides, if my Twitter platform disappeared tomorrow, it would impose a major cost on me. I would feel that loss, and be quite distressed it if was the result of arbitrary acts by anonymous ideological bigots.

However, addressing this by eliminating or restricting Section 230 protection would be more understandable if I had any confidence at all in our civil justice system not to prevent abusive lawsuits that themselves will stifle free expression. I just don't trust that system.

Having said this, the network effects by which Twitter and Facebook provide the above benefits make them appear more like a privately owned "public accommodation" or "common carriers," than a purely "private" actor. Such nongovernment actors have a duty not to discriminate.

Most antidiscrimination laws governing places of public accommondation are based on this category of actors that share some aspects of government and some aspects of private actors. They are nongovernmental "public" institutions.

I have not thought through all the potential implications of trying to distinguish Twitter and Facebook from other media outlets. But identifying the difference--should such difference exist--is what legal theory is for. I would not prejudge the conclusion.

I am not certain that protecting people who Twitter, Facebook &YouTube have accepted as users from having their content or presence excluded from these public fora would necessarily lead to or logically entail censorship of these media. This is the conversation we need to have.

But any such conversation should be as realistic about the social benefits of social media as it is about its undeniable social costs. By underestimating these benefits, its conclusion that we would be "better off" if litigation led to the demise of social media is questionable.

Especially if there are other regulatory models that *might* address the social costs without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.