How to Limit Social Media's Power without Big Government

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"... From 1949 to 1987 [abolished by President Reagan], the so-called [Federal Communications Commission] fairness doctrine was used to utterly silence the Right—Rush Limbaugh was a salesman for the Kansas City Royals until Reagan finally repealed the rule, and Murray Rothbard famously could fit the entire libertarian movement in a living room. The doctrine’s repeal opened the floodgates for talk radio, then Fox News, and now content from the Mises Institute to Praeger University to the Babylon Bee. Given that the vast majority of federal workers remain partisan Democrats—the “Deep State,” if you will, hasn’t changed its colors. Reimposing regulation of speech likely means a return to socialist domination of speech.
However, actual solutions being proposed involve not more regulation, but less. In particular, narrowing an immunity that was granted to online platforms in Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. This was a special immunity from liability for user-posted content so long as the company was acting as a platform open to all comers—think “common carrier” rules like with the phone company. ...

This meant, up until 2016, that social media companies were very careful to maintain a hands-off policy, allowing essentially all legal speech so they wouldn't lose that shield.

This started changing in 2016, as progressive pressure was brought against social media companies for the sin of giving voice to conservatives during the Brexit referendum, followed soon after by Donald Trump’s election victory. Meanwhile, individual judges increasingly interpreted 230 more broadly as permitting censorship at will. In fact, European regulators actually started requiring censorship for any speech individual regulators personally regarded as too right-wing. This, unfortunately, built a broad censorship capability in social media companies.

Given the existential importance of the shield, social media companies started gradually demonetizing users so they couldn’t earn money on their channels. They moved on to outright bans, again starting gradually by banning intentionally provocative users like former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopolos and Alex Jones of Infowars, and now on to increasingly mainstream users, including, last week, the largest conservative newspaper in the US, the New York Post.
Because a divided Congress won’t rewrite 230, practical reform involves narrowing 230 immunities so that egregious censorship becomes, once again, a bad choice for social media. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas has openly wished for a test case so the court can do this, while market-friendly FCC director Ajit Pai has proposed rules narrowing 230 immunities back to what they used to be. ...
Unfortunately, the market isn’t as competitive as it used to be. Conservative-friendly social media startups such as Gab and Parler have faced a gauntlet of harassment and choke points, from being denied bank accounts or payment accounts to being denied essential services like web hosting or hacker protection. Given the recent explosion in corporate “wokeness,” this harassment isn’t going away, and in fact is likely to increase. ..."

How to Limit Social Media's Power without Growing Government | Mises Wire