Government, not tech CEOS, must set speech rules

The following is from a Washington Post editorial:

President Donald Trump's exile from Twitter and Facebook last week left him with Parler, a fringe, laissez-faire social media site, as his likely best alternative for online communication. Then Parler found itself on the outs, too, booted from Apple and Google's app stores and Amazon's web-hosting service.

Trump and his followers say they are victims of anticonservative discrimination. Their complaints are unconvincing. It is legitimate for corporate actors to scrub their sites of speech with the potential to cause harm, such as the explicit plotting that preceded last week's armed insurrection at the Capitol.

All the same, their response has revealed the tremendous power a handful of private companies wield over the public square. Some of those companies are well known (one, Amazon, is led by Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington

Post). Others operate the hidden infrastructure of the internet and are unfamiliar to most. In neither case is the problem likely to be solved by familiar antitrust remedies such as corporate breakups.

When it comes to operating the internet, network effects can mean a bigger business is better for consumers, which means we will never see 50 app stores or cloud-computing hosts. Instead, the situation must be tackled head-on, in the same manner this nation has tackled utilities in the past: through regulation.

If we want rules of the road for the Twitters and Parlers — rules about inciting violence, for example — they should be set by our elected representatives, not unelected CEOS. If we want those rules to be enforced fairly, without targeting speech that is merely unpopular, we should insist companies put into place systems for transparency, notice and appeal for their decisions. The public should be able to judge platforms on the clarity of their terms of service and the consistency of enforcement.

These companies are recognizing their responsibility for shaping our discourse and our democracy. Some will say this puts us on a slippery slope toward unacceptable curtailments of expression. They're right, but the alternative is violent rhetoric left unchecked, which we now know too well can result in violent action. It's time for the public to insist the government do its job and set some rules that balance the urgency of free speech with the necessity of public safety.