Government should regulate social media platforms like utilities

Your article on Facebook’s decision to ban Holocaust denying posts raises an issue that has been perplexing for a long time (“Facebook bans posts that deny or distort the Holocaust,” Oct. 12). Both Facebook and Twitter have been struggling with the question as to how to balance freedom of speech with the spread of malicious and possibly dangerous misinformation, and neither has been able to resolve the problem. The answer is obvious and that is that social platforms need to be subject to government regulation, like all other public utilities. It is ridiculous to allow issues that so deeply affect the public to be decided by CEOs of for-profit corporations that have obvious self interest in the outcome.