Good take on the power of social media companies:

I think a lot of us see the suspension and banning of social media accounts as a minor issue. After all, usually it’s people on the right grumbling that their bigoted or inflammatory content has been taken down... But there is something deeply dangerous here, and I don’t think Facebook and Twitter bans should be treated as a small issue at all. Especially in the age of coronavirus, where the physical ability to “publicly assemble” has been restricted, social media is the public square. Crucial political organizing takes place there, public figures are held to account there, news is spread there. Dramas that affect the fate of giant companies or even nations can even happen on Twitter (I mean that: Donald Trump can create a diplomatic crisis with a single tweet and Elon Musk can wipe out billions in value for his shareholders.)

This means, as many have noted before, that the public square is now quite literally privatized. It is not a commons. It is owned by shareholders and controlled by billionaires. And decisions about who gets to speak and whether they will be heard are no longer governed by the rule of law. They are governed by the opaque “community standards” of a private corporation whose mandate is to maximize shareholder value.

Can we take a moment to appreciate the radicalism of what has happened? Private companies now have a powerful gatekeeping capacity over public speech. They are, effectively, governments. But they are not democratic governments. You do not get to vote on Facebook’s community standards. You did not elect anybody to the lawmaking body. Decisions about how speech will be policed take place in dictatorial institutions ruled over by creepy billionaires. When public speech took place mostly outside, decisions about what could be heard were made by courts, and subject to the First Amendment. Now, because the United States gives almost limitless power to corporations to set their “terms of service,” the power to abridge the First Amendment has been handed over to private companies...

Is there a plausible version of Facebook or Twitter that is compatible with a democratic society? I think so, but it would require them to be nationalized and their governance structure radically overhauled. In the absence of that, the only hope is in finally developing an alternative, not-for-profit, democratic social media platform.