I agree with you about Trudeau, from everything I’ve read about him, but I’m in the U.S. (New York), not Canada, so we have a somewhat different kind of guy in charge. And no one, him included, knows what he will or won’t do later today, much less in the coming months and years. But still, I probably have more reason to be optimistic — assuming he doesn’t get thrown out by an Establishment coup d’état — that he’ll at least try to do something about this issue.

Really, however, this may come down, in the end, not to government regulation but to the court system. ewrxroads posted one such path that could be pursued here. The idea, in general, is that these social networks have gotten so big and essential to our daily communication that the First Amendment should apply to them the same way it would apply to the phone company. They’re no longer just a little mom-and-pop shop that has (and should have) the right to restrict your speech on its property. The free-market fundamentalist approach to this issue would be to say, well, if Twitter or Medium or Facebook or whoever are going to start restricting conservative speech, then conservatives can start up their own competitive social network that will do the opposite, or maybe someone will come along who starts up a social network that doesn’t regulate speech at all. Maybe. But my perspective on this is a bit different. Because it’s so difficult to create and build up a social network that has the kind of traction and plays the kind of essential role in our communication that the existent networks do, I don’t want to gamble our freedom to speak freely on the mere possibility that someone else will come along to open up shop and succeed in rivaling or even besting the likes of Twitter. And I definitely don’t want one social network for liberals and another for conservatives (and another for Marxists and another for fascists, etc.). We already have a hard enough time engaging people who disagree with us as it is. The last thing we need is more echo chambers. What we need are big online town squares where people are exposed to a wide variety of viewpoints, including viewpoints they find totally crazy and offensive. People need to learn to engage and express reasoned disagreement, rather than to run and hide or ask the authorities to go ban someone that hurt their brittle feelings.

Another way of approaching the same issue is to imagine that a major telecom provider starts acting like Twitter and listening in on our conversations and cutting off phone service to those who express right-wing (or left-wing) viewpoints. In such a situation, we likely wouldn’t be saying, “Well, it’s just a private company, so they have the right to do that, and if someone doesn’t like it, they can go sign up with a different provider or, if none services their area, then wait for someone to start up a rival telecom company that doesn’t discriminate against them.” Rather, we’d be saying, “Okay, no, you guys are providing an essential public service and so, if you try to censor speech on your network, you are in violation of the First Amendment, so now we’re going to file a lawsuit to assert our First Amendment rights.” That’s what I want for social networks as well. There’s always going to be a fine-line-drawing issue of, well, when is a social network big and essential enough that the First Amendment should apply to it?, and that’s a line the courts will have to draw, but it shouldn’t defeat the basic point I’m making.