This is my problem with it.

Social media, the big ones that everyone uses, are a blight on society. They are worse than cancer and they need regulation and control.

Really, the bigger problem is the monetization of data, and the ever-deeper orificices that they try to dig into for said data.

But I digress.

At the same time, they are private industries running a public (ish) forum.

Historically, we’d expect the forum owners to be responsible about the content they are presenting, and ensure that it doesn’t reflect poorly on them or their community.

In other words…you wouldn’t see the grocer keeping hate speech up on his community board…but if you did, I’m sure a lot of people would choose a different grocer.

The social media giants are taking a page right out of the book of Mormon, and gotten itself so engrained into modern society that trying to separate yourself from it will, at some level, result in social exile. That’s bad.

Now theres a company backed by an increasingly adversarial nation-state that is in charge of a shit ton of that data. That’s bad.

There’s a lot of bad. Ultimately, it’s a highly nuanced issue.