Facebook is a private company and is subject to competition. The government is not. We might have worried about Prodigy and CompuServe restricting speech (and w

Facebook is a private company and is subject to competition. The government is not. We might have worried about Prodigy and CompuServe restricting speech (and we literally did, and that got us Section 230), but they're irrelevant now. We might have worried about MySpace, but it's irrelevant now. But the decisions the US government made in the 1990s and 2000s are incredibly relevant today, despite multiple changes in which party had the upper hand. The Constitution places restrictions on what the government can do because government overreach is a particular, unique problem. It also provides for popular election to the government for the same reason - and nobody says that it's bad that we can't elect Facebook's leaders. Now, perhaps the argument is that Facebook has grown too large and too powerful, to the point where Facebook censorship is worse than government censorship. If that's happened, that means we should have regulated Facebook a long time ago (and if we don't, we're on our way to your favorite cyberpunk dystopia where corporations are the real governments), and we should get around to doing so. But it hardly means that we should give in, treat Facebook like a government, and start saying "Facebook shall make no policy" any more than it means that we should vote for Facebook's CEO.