A friend remarked on the last post (The Girl Who Was Saturday: An Immodest Proposal Regarding the Regulation of Social Networks Qua Public Utilities (I)) as follows:
I'm not sure how at all a media company of any sort is like a public utility. It's not as though what they provide is a finite resource, that might be considered necessary for living (under certain conditions). Even if every media company cancelled you and I, it would not be an abridgment of our freedom of speech, because some interested person (or some company acting as a juridic person, as we might say) has a right not to associate with us.
Taking the second part of the first paragraph first, it’s quite true that a person’s cancellation by every media company on earth would not be an abridgment of freedom of speech. It would be irritating, inconvenient, and (if we had done nothing wrong) a violation (I think) of natural justice; but certainly it would not violate the Constitution. This, indeed, is part of why I dubbed my proposal immodest: because I don’t believe it’s actually necessary. Then again, very little legislation *is* necessary.
Nor, indeed, is social media a finite resource. And if regulation of it were not in the offing, I would say: let a thousand flowers bloom. Let a thousand websites arise, and let them be as scandalous as you please. It’s the looming specter of regulation, which risks helping the incipient monopolies become precisely that, which makes me suggest government buy out as an alternative that might be actually *less* likely to allow them to become monopolies. Nor am I under the illusion that such a buyout would protect my speech on the bought forum: I am quite as likely to be cancelled by the putative Office of Social Media Services as by a Zuckerbergette. But the chance that an alternative forum, where I could “speak,” might then flourish would be greater, I think, if the government owned the primary forum. It’s a crackpot, half-baked idea, admittedly.
To be continued.
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