Not so fast on over-regulation of social media

Despite plenty of apologies and initiatives designed to tamp down controversy, public frustration around the big social media companies keeps increasing.

Much of the upset revolves around the question of when speech should be censored and when users should be booted off a platform. While the issue won’t be neatly resolved any time soon, the important thing to remember is that the big social media platforms are private companies, not public utilities.

It’s true that, in key respects, the entities where most people consume and create social media differ markedly from other companies. Part of the reason for that is the huge leap forward over traditional media that social media achieved. Facebook became a platform where many online publications simply lived or died, thanks to the power of the Facebook algorithm to drive traffic, and therefore valuation or dollars, to other sites. Twitter became a source of breaking news faster than even the most powerful cable networks and newspapers — even though it often merely transmits news traditional reporters have uncovered.

With minimal barriers to entry, social media platforms didn’t just put themselves forward as a new kind of public square; they offered a new kind of quasi-public experience powerful and enticing enough to make good on that representation. And with the user base, media influence and huge market valuations that followed, so many people became so reliant on the big platforms that loss of access increasingly meant exile from all mainstream online audiences.

The complex ideological profile of the big platforms has given critics across the political spectrum reason to resist their power over quasipublic speech online. For many on the left, the platforms are far too indulgent to reactionary cranks and bigots; for many on the right, the platforms are edging closer to purges of even respected and reasonable conservatives. In the main, the desire to treat the private platforms as public utilities comes from the left. But the sense is growing on the right that free-speech protections may need to be enforced against the platforms’ censors.

However well-intentioned, these feelings too readily treat temporary conditions in an unstable environment as demanding regulatory action of a new and sweeping kind. While it often seems unthinkable that the big platforms could lose their power, just this year Americans have seen massive platforms like Snapchat falter, and many still remember how quickly the first social media behemoth, Myspace, sank into oblivion. Only a relatively few people are utterly dependent for their livelihood on the big platforms, and many of them can jump from one to another without catastrophe.

Still, critics across the political spectrum do have a point that the platforms have become so powerful that their influence over public discussion can be pernicious. It’s easy to dismiss effective no-platforming campaigns against leading fringe figures, but that logic can swiftly be applied to sidelining legitimate participants in important debates.

In addition to people simply growing fed up with fruitless online conflict and logging off, the real challenge to the dominance of the leading private-sector platforms is likely to come from private lawsuits, not regulation or other forms of public oversight. A messy path to a better future online, perhaps. But not as messy as distorting our core legal principles.

— Los Angeles Daily News,

Digital First Media