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Setting aside the very significant First Amendment concerns, I'm interested in what a common carrier regulatory system for social media would look like.
Is the rule "social media companies must carry all content and not do any moderation?" Such a rule would make social media dangerous and unusable, as platforms could not remove spam, child sex abuse material, murder videos, and so much else that we fortunately never see.
For the common carrier advocates, I think the more frequent argument is "social media companies must carry all constitutionally protected speech." There are a few big problems with this. Some content is quite easy to identify as constitutionally unprotected, but other
content is much closer to the line. And you have a private company making this constitutional judgment quickly, only to have millions of such decisions possibly second-guessed by a regulatory commission or court.
Which brings me to the next question - who decides whether the platforms have violated their common carrier obligations? A court? The FCC? FTC? A new social media regulatory agency?
Unlike full 230 repeal, this probably would result in platforms keeping a lot more content up. But I worry that if it is right on the line of being legal, courts will err on the side of keeping it up. And I question how much value that speech has for society.
I also worry about removing any ability of platforms to take down or even restrict access to harmful but constitutionally protected content, like hate speech.
All of that said, I completely understand and share the concerns about a few large platforms having so much control over people's ability to get their messages out. Even if you agree with their decisions over the past year, imagine if they had new management and removed speech
that *you* believed was valuable and constitutionally protected. And while I'd like to say the free market will take care of all of these concerns, I think it would be incorrect to assume that it currently is doing that.
I just don't see how a common carrier system would be able to fairly address this concern while also ensuring that the Internet is safe and usable. I'd love to hear solutions.
(I also don't think that common carrier rules for social media would survive First Amendment scrutiny under current precedent, but of course some disagree with me on that point).
