> Nothing about Facebook's nature forces them to go beyond that and act as de facto language legislators The ethics of being a/the major institution of mass co

> Nothing about Facebook's nature forces them to go beyond that and act as de facto language legislators The ethics of being a/the major institution of mass communication in large parts of the world may not force FB to act as language legislators, but these ethics certainly should compel them to do so. Relevant points: - If FB’s status as a mass comms source is threatened, then the company itself is threatened. This threat can be due to a lack in trust in the platform and/or legislation that effectively legislates them out of existence (see below re free speech). This existential issue should compel them to factor language legislation into their corporate policies. - Stockholders certainly care about FB’s status as a mass comms source even if no one else does. - Stakeholders obviously care about this, too. - Relying on governments to regulate mass communications is a Pandora’s box for FB since FB is an international platform. - In the US, in order to facilitate and encourage free speech, mass comms laws are not particularly restrictive, but they are built on an underlying assumption about social-based regulation that generally hold up but seem to be completely broken with platforms like FB. If FB doesn’t address this issue, then the laws that end up addressing this issue may end up legislating FB out of existence. To close, whether playing the language legislator is part of FB’s nature, an emergent property, or something else, there are very real reasons that FB has policies on regulating language. Whether they do this well or not is a completely different issue, but putting the onus on government legislators to address the problem with formal laws seems, at best, overly dismissive.