Some private enterprises are treated like government services and regulated as such. Utilities, for example. I doubt there are many countries where the electricity company can fire a paying client. The key is not who manages or owns the business, but whether it's a commons platform - something needed to function in society.
So yeah, there's a pretty strong case to be made that certain internet companies are like that. Can you survive without social media? Sure, but you can also survive without sewer. It's just a lot harder to live a normal life.
Electric utilities were granted monopoly status in order the treat them as utilities, prior to the 1930s they were just private companies that were wildly successful, and didn’t want to expand into unprofitable rural markets.
That’s not the dynamic occurring today, social media is available in even the most rural setting, albeit in a reduced form to support low bandwidth.
Do we really want to allow Facebook and Twitter monopoly status and then treat them as defacto government entities? Will that result in better services? I do not think so.
As we’ve seen with TikTok’s rise, competition within the space leads to better outcomes, not treating social media companies as “utilities”. Social media companies are not in any way comparable to a sewer system, an electric grid, or a phone line network.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Electric power, water, sewage, phone, internet access... each has its own specific history, times 170 countries. Not all identical, but the outcomes are pretty similar.
SM is clearly different from that and very much still in flux, and overly regulating it would be more of a burden than an advantage. Some amount of regulation may help though, especially designed to encourage diversity of ideas.
But mostly I wanted to counter the meme that "it's not censorship if it's a private company". Yes it is, when you have only one twitter and a handful of SM companies in total. It's not the ownership that matters, it's the ubiquity and the effect.
>History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Electric power, water, sewage, phone, internet access... each has its own specific history, times 170 countries. Not all identical, but the outcomes are pretty similar.
They all require physical infrastructure to every house, to provide service capacity. As such, we don't want 7 different companies for each, laying 7 different sewer systems and 7 different electric grids.
When the service is virtual, the same infrastructure limits don't materialize in the same way. We don't need to run new ISP lines to bring on a new platform.
So while ISP are certainly more like classic utilities, websites and social platforms just aren't.
>But mostly I wanted to counter the meme that "it's not censorship if it's a private company". Yes it is, when you have only one twitter and a handful of SM companies in total. It's not the ownership that matters, it's the ubiquity and the effect.
Corporate censorship isn't a "free speech" problem. SM companies just aren't enough like a utility, they are not actually required to function in society (unlike electricity, and running water).
Did you learn nothing from the battle over NetNeutrality?
> As such, we don't want 7 different companies for each, laying 7 different sewer systems and 7 different electric grids.
I think decentralization is better way than building one big ISP controlled by the government. I live in a place (Utah), that has a non profit owned fiber infrastructure and leases it out to different ISPs, where you can even buy the dark fiber yourself for like $2500. I can choose from 10-15 ISPs with highly competitive prices and service. The ISPs can have whatever policies they want but the free market will take care of them pretty fast.
Except you can argue that we don't have only one twitter. We have many, and potentially thousands. I can fire up my own version of twitter in a couple of minutes. I (or my group, clan, subculture, whatever) can fire up my/our own facebook in minutes. OTOH I only have one electric power supplier to my home.
> especially designed to encourage diversity of ideas.
Exposure to diversity of ideas is not a problem on social media. What drowns out most ideas is actually threat of cyberbullying and internet mobs, being drowned out by bots, and algorithmic sorting that prioritizes controversial content over moderate voices. Only the last one is related to moderation/editorial choices by the company and it’s rarely framed as a free speech issue.
> Some amount of regulation may help though, especially designed to encourage diversity of ideas
I wonder if limited Section 512 reform is the answer [1].
Remove it for social media platforms over a certain size that sell ads. Create a safe harbour if they form an independent appeals commission, like the one Facebook did; but with teeth on enforcement, tightly-scoped but binding rulemaking powers, and rules about how its members are chosen. Company can flag and ban. Users can appeal. Commission can go to the courts to enforce its will or force discovery. (Maybe throw in a couple commission members elected by users, I don’t know.)
FWIW, there is a precedent regarding shopping malls and the like. They are clearly private property, yet they must provide access for political activity.
> As we’ve seen with TikTok’s rise, competition within the space leads to better outcomes
I disagree. The whole social media industry is rotten and needs a dose of... something... to bring it back to sanity. Strict limits on user data collection and algorithmic "feeds" would be a good start IMHO. Otherwise the same patterns repeat themselves, where the most rage-inducing content gets spread the furthest.
I dont know where the line is, but we should agree that a line is needed.
People are saying a line is not necessary. That is at the core, the problem. We need to agree that these companies -by accident or otherwise- have become a common good, similar to a "utility"
Take a similar example: at some point a company stops being a company...and becomes a monopoly. Where is that line? We dont know. However its important we recognize private companies operating as monopolies are not in the best interests of society.
Private companies operating as common goods providers should be subject to additional rules. That is what we should agree on. Then let others define what that is.
If you "do something" about algorithmic feeds then that law is going to be written by politicians or their advisers.
If you, engaged user of a tech site, a developers forum, have no idea what that should look like, then why would the "something" from politicians work out better?
I think bringing back the adventurous side of the internet is important. Back in the day if you wanted to find information about a specific topic you had to search(not google search) for it. In doing so, you weren't inundated with more and more information that starts relevant, but quickly devolves into whats trending to drive DAUs and add clicks.
SM is not a utility but the ability to disseminate information to huge number of peoples is and it's just as important to regulate as electricity and sewage. Moderation of information is the fourth arm of the government and needs to be developed if we're ever going to be able to trust each other again.
It has never been an issue before because the means of communication have always been limited but modern electronic communication has changed all that and it's clear that we can't exist in this wild west phase anymore.
SM had eroded the trust in institutions and between people and groups. It had put all of us in bubbles just to sell ads. Informational and cognitive hygiene must be recognized and taught to everyone so people can defend themselves and take care of what they hold dear and true.
>So yeah, there's a pretty strong case to be made that certain internet companies are like that. Can you survive without social media? Sure, but you can also survive without sewer. It's just a lot harder to live a normal life.
In my experience, there is actually not a pretty strong case to be made for that, as evidenced by all the people who say there is a strong case to be made, but then fail to make a strong case. Perhaps they mean, "a case which convinces me, specifically, 1 person who is already convinced"?
Also, trying to survive without sewer is what led to The Plague's last big hit. Even the Romans knew it was unhealthy. Meanwhile, in this case, INCREASED use of social media is what's been shown to be unhealthy.
> there is a strong case to be made, but then fail to make a strong case
Especially given:
1) The number of digital outlets. Utilities tend to be regulated when there are no alternatives or merely 1 alternative (especially when monopoly is being intentionally granted for the purposes of not duplicating infrastructure). We're not hurting for options in ways to talk to each other these days.
2) The abundance of very diverse conversations on display on the most popular social media. Political poles are pretty well represented with content in proportion to their influence (and all this even considering that the right of private vehicles for speech to set rules for discussion and even make editorial choices is itself a free speech right).
> 1) The number of digital outlets. Utilities tend to be regulated when there are no alternatives or merely 1 alternative (especially when monopoly is being intentionally granted for the purposes of not duplicating infrastructure). We're not hurting for options in ways to talk to each other these days.
It's anecdotal, but I don't feel this to be true in my personal life. I am not on Facebook by choice. But I feel like it impoverishes my life in a number of ways:
1. Most of my family and friends post their life updates on Facebook.
2. My neighborhood uses a Facebook group for most communication and coordination.
3. Several local companies use their Facebook pages to broadcast their events, sales, etc, and as their primary form of outreach.
4. Several local hobby groups do the same.
In each case, this is general communication and information that I want in my life, but I can't get it easily. Even when I go out of my way to get it (private conversations, visiting websites, etc), I still miss things because Facebook has the network and it's the primary way my communities communicate.
So while in principle I agree with everything you said, in my own life I empathetically agree with the subjective sense that it feels like a utility. It feels like living without something important in some ways.
(It was easier when I was married and my wife was on Facebook and could relay information to me. Also anecdotal, but I've heard of this arrangement a number of times.)
Google, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter are all private entities. Let's say they don't like the Democratic party. They can single handedly cause a media block out and be able to unfairly influence the elections, view of the world etc. You won't be able to find a single search result or a speech or tweet.
In this context we can't afford to treat these companies as private entities. They should not be able to block/ban whoever they want just because they feel threatened and challenged by their views.
You say “single handedly”, but you just named five different services by three different companies. Do you see the problem here?
Are all the radios broken? Do newspapers not exist? Has TV vanished? Fox News alone has millions of viewers every week. There are hundreds of other outlets from which people get their news.
You really think Twitter can unilaterally erase something from public consciousness?
This is taking away the very obvious point: at some point, lack of participation alone is seen as a sign of nonconformity. Which itself has caused enough issues for individuals while at least "making it seem" as if the majority are okay with the status quo.
It's one thing to be denied access to these platforms. It's another thing entirely to see a specific opinion pushed on the young and the less critical, trickling down to actual demands, rules and restrictions. These platforms are powerful enough to do so. You can find many examples of misinformation translating to demands in CS and IT alone, and these are still relatively harmless.
You’re moving the goalposts. There are plenty of entities that can unilaterally have that great effect. That doesn’t mean they’re so vital to public wellbeing that the government needs to take them over or whatever it is we’re talking about.
I actually don’t think giant corporations are desirable. But that’s not the discussion people are having here. They’re claiming that Twitter is so indispensable, so woven into the fabric of everyday life that it’s tantamount to a public utility, like electricity or sewage.
Okay, but you’re acting as though it’s the same claim as “Twitter has a lot of power”.
I’ve explained my reasoning against the utility claim. If you want to defend it, do so. It might be reasonable, but you haven’t offered anything other than substituting it with a different argument.
It's not the same claim as being indispensible, but it's the same claim as being extremely vowen into everyday life. I think that claim reflects what is actually being discussed better. What I offer is not a defense of the claim, but a request to consider the claim seriously.
In the public utility metaphor, utilities were not defined until they became defined. There's no reason to discount a possible category of "utilithing" that shares some properties with the existing one but not others.
It might be that I missed your explanation (was it in a sibling thread?), but in this thread I don't see a consideration for that idea. "They are not so vital" is not an argument against it, but your personal value judgement.
It’s in my root comment in this thread. I’m not giving my personal value judgment — it’s the value judgment of the ~75% of adults in the US who don’t use Twitter. It’s a real stretch to say that something less than a quarter of the population uses is “vital” for everyday life. How many Americans do you think go a month without electricity or sewage?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the majority of those companies already did that with the Hunter Biden laptop story.
If only Fox News is covering something and you’re not allowed to talk about it on Twitter, Facebook, etc. then there’s no effective way for it to reach everyone who doesn’t watch Fox.
Right, which is fine. I don’t watch Fox because I don’t like the content Fox produces. You seem to be interested in turning Twitter into some sort of firehose wherein I’m forced to consume Fox content anyway.
Me too. But they have FB accounts, IG accounts, TikTok accounts and so on. The share of people without any kind of social media presence or consumption is shrinking everyday.
Not long ago twitter, telephony/mobiles and electricity didn't exist, and people lived normal lives - but over time "normal" is redefined.
The issue isn't twitter, but online discourse in general, and what happens when it becomes "normal". There is also an issue of choice - it is normal not to read books, as many people do not; yet I wouldn't accept this means you can deprive people who want to read of a library.
Right, and not long before that didn’t have electricity before too. In 2022 in the US, living without electricity is very abnormal. Living without Twitter is… not.
If your issue is online discourse in general, then we’re in a good place: it’s very easy to set up your own website and distribute whatever content you want without needing permission from corporations.
The implication here is that this doesn't have a convincing case behind it?
Then when would you act? There are already plenty of monopolies and "lobbies" in America on the basis of the same efficiency (not acting until it's a "problem") - maybe proactive caution around big business should be the norm given all the historical abuses, from beef to chemicals to medicine to tobacco?
> The implication here is that this doesn't have a convincing case behind it?
The explication, I guess, yeah. I was and am explicitly saying that, yes.
> Then when would you act?
When the prediction that this may become a issue becomes more convincing, somewhere between where it's at now, and climate change, which already has a convincing case that it WILL become a issue (nay, IS one!)
> maybe proactive caution around big business should be the norm given all the historical abuses
Agreed, proactive caution towards things for which there is a convincing case that it is or may become an issue
> I know plenty of people who don’t have Twitter accounts and live extremely normal lives.
Even this I'd say is a stretch. If they're consuming any kind of news or contemporary entertainment, Twitter is absolutely impacting their lives. The degree to which it quickly propagates groupthink and shared narratives is difficult to overstate.
Do you think pre-Internet mass media — one-way communication from corporation to consumer — does not propagate groupthink and shared narratives?
We live in a society, so of course popular things will have nth-order effects on everyone’s lives. TikTok, Facebook, Fox News, the New York Times, Disney, Nintendo, Steam, Itch, Bandcamp, your friend’s podcast. It’s extremely unclear to me why Twitter should be singled out here.
> Do you think pre-Internet mass media — one-way communication from corporation to consumer — does not propagate groupthink and shared narratives?
It certainly did, but not as quickly, and not in a separate channel from the media itself.
Put bluntly: today's journalists, entertainers, and influencers can very quickly arrive at the same (sometimes factually incorrect) narrative through following the same in-group of people on Twitter, which then results in "real" news, entertainment, and other media being produced that share the same groupthink and narrative. This can happen in hours, even minutes.
But it's not clear to your average consumer that what's dictating the stories on nightly news, Saturday Night Live, or the late night shows is actually Twitter, and the ease with which the same people can create the same bubbles without explicitly coordinating.
Size. Market penetration of Twitter is orders of magnitude above that of Nintendo or your friend. You should rather ask: how does influence scale relative to size?
> Sure, but you can also survive without sewer. It's just a lot harder to live a normal life.
Not really but that sense of learned helplessness is certainly good for their bottom line. I imagine it increases your propensity to buy whatever crap they're spamming your feed with.
In reality life without social media is a much happier existence.
> Or if you think SM is bad, then it can be a collective decision to ban SM, like we ban heroin.
Off topic but I don't think banning heroin did anyone any good. We still need proper labeling, packaging, and storage laws. We still need laws that prohibit drugging someone without their explicit permission. We probably need laws that don't allow sale to minors. We probably need ban on advertising "controlled substances". We might even say certain things you can only get under medical supervision by a licensed medical professional.
I just don't think possession ought to be a crime like it is today. Endangering others, sure but possession is just asking for abuse by law enforcement.
That specifically worked for Greek democracies, which were as much about the ability to exclude the most powerful as they were to enable the public participation in power.
In those cases the solution isn’t to force those companies to moderate their content differently, but to prevent them from becoming de-facto monopolies.
The popularity of Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and Google’s core products isn’t the issue. The issue is that any time a successful competitor comes up, they can just buy them out.
Imagine if Facebook wasn’t able to buy Instagram, and it had survived as a competing platform?
There’s no need to apply the concept of “free speech” to private companies. There is every need to regulate monopolies so that a handful of tech giants don’t have the power to effectively suppress content across the majority of the outlets people are using every day.
Twitter sells you a voice to a possibly broad audience depending on how many followers you have, the ads are a micro-currency to facilitate these transactions between voice haver and voice hearer.
That's been utterly ruined by the blue check mark verification system.
Promoting a specific type of user over another is antithetical to the original ideals of Internet forums - whereby the most interesting / useful / "good" content filtered to the top regardless of authorship.
> So yeah, there's a pretty strong case to be made that certain internet companies are like that. Can you survive without social media? Sure, but you can also survive without sewer. It's just a lot harder to live a normal life.
Holy crud, then break them up if they're that powerful. The right to private moderation is part of the 1st Amendment and should only be abridged in very specific circumstances; don't get rid of the 1st Amendment just because you're scared of Facebook's lobby arm.
There are lots of platforms other than Twitter/Facebook. Anti-monopoly regulation against tech companies has reasonably wide bipartisan support in the US. We also have more evidence nowadays that social media doesn't necessarily have to result in natural monopolies. There are so many things we could do rather than significantly abridge people's rights to free association.
- The government could dump monetary grants into Mastodon/Matrix or otherwise subsidize federated/self-hosted alternatives the same way that we've subsidized renewable energy.
- The government could stop allowing purchases by these tech giants in general.
- The government could split up Facebook/Instagram/Horizon.
- The government could push for more open app policies on stores or regulate sideloading (seriously, the amount of pushback this idea gets as a violation of Apple's rights, compared to the amount of support for regulating social network moderation is wild to me. Both of those are an interference in private rights, but one of those things is also a significantly bigger restriction of 1st Amendment rights than the other).
- The government could force open APIs between services (Europe is trying to do this, we'll see whether or not they get it right).
- If that's too much interference into the market, the government could explicitly legalize adversarial interoperability and revise the CFAA to make it easier to scrape websites.
- Then there's an entire conversation to be had about payment systems online and why we have some of the market forces that we do have around monetizing eyeballs and paying for content.
----
But to immediately jump to treating Facebook as a public utility -- not only is that a really drastic step with a lot of 1st Amendment implications, it's also kind of a depressing step because it assumes we couldn't make better social networks than Facebook/Twitter, and I absolutely believe we could. It's depressing to think that we can't ever move past them and the only thing we could do is just try to reduce one specific problem that they have.
I don't want Facebook to be an essential service; even if they didn't censor anything I don't want to use Facebook. I don't really care what their moderation policy is. I hate almost everything about the website; I want alternatives, not a more regulated monopoly. I don't even like the ad-supported model in the first place, I think that monetizing attention is antithetical to creating a good social network.
The view that Facebook is an utility assumes the world only consists of the United States. If it’s a utility and 75% of its users are outside the US, whose utility is it? The UN?
That is a really good point. There is a certain kind of nationalism/exceptionalism inherent in the US deciding that Facebook is both too essential to be left to its own devices and that naturally the US should decide what its policies end up being for the rest of the world -- and I often forget that perspective because I'm in the US and to a certain extent guilty of forgetting about the wider implications of US policy sometimes.
On the other hand, a robust market has fewer of those problems -- the US deciding "we don't want a US company to control the entire market, and we want more companies with differing policies" doesn't have the same implications as the US deciding, "we want the US company to do what we want everywhere." So there's a lot less exceptionalism rolled up in the idea of subsidizing alternatives; and non-US governments have already started to talk about either subsidizing some alternatives like Matrix or adopting them internally within government departments.
Unless the idea is to only regulate how Facebook handles content being displayed to US users, but (while companies do often have country-specific policies), drastically increasing the scope of that kind of system has a lot of its own implications about filter bubbles and communication between countries.
>The government could dump monetary grants into Mastodon/Matrix or otherwise subsidize federated/self-hosted alternatives the same way that we've subsidized renewable energy.
As one example, France has generous tax deductions that effectively triple the value of your contribution for places like Framasoft, although it's not necessarily targeted just at free software.
I completely agree with you in the abstract, but I worry primarily about this chain of causality:
Network effects -> market forces -> political will
I think splitting up these giants is supremely important, but the only healthy approach long term is to require open APIs for cross-service interoperability. This is the only solution to separate network effects from market forces.
It's not unreasonable to want to be able to communicate with your friends, family, and brands you like in a convenient way.
_Either_ you require interoperability so that people can separate their (real) social networks from their choice of technological-implementation, _or_ you allow things to grow unbounded such that they become de facto utilities.
Longer conversation than I'm willing to go into here, and I assume that you already know this anyway, but this is a point that Cory Doctorow pushes a lot. His take is that sites like Facebook in particular got where they are because they were able to scrape and remotely manage other sites, and that after they rose to dominance (among other things like buying competitors) they also pushed to shut down a lot of those systems and make it harder to do what they did.
I'm interested in seeing how EU legislation works out here. I tend to sometimes be relatively skeptical about EU legislation because I think the final results tend to miss the mark or get compromised or have side-effects, but I have seen a lot of people that I respect a lot say that this legislation is good, so I'm really curious to see what happens with it.
I don't personally think that network effects are the only thing that's factoring into current tech dominance -- my evidence for that is that Facebook has had to buy competitors before, and I don't think they would have felt that threat if they were confident in network effects alone to save them. I've also gone through enough internal emails from the various leaks from Facebook to where I can see some the anti-competitive strategies they tried that (in my mind) were in a very different category than just locking down an API. But network effects are certainly an important part of the puzzle, and even ignoring the market, having more user agency to remotely control accounts and build/use their own clients for services is (in my opinion) a really important part of individual freedom, so I'm all for improvements in that area.
And highly agreed, the problem with Facebook is not that people want to talk to friends and family. I don't think that people's instincts to be connected to each other should be treated as something that's unreasonable or bad.
I actually agree with the Mastodon/Matrix/federated approach, I'd just be worried about hosting/network neutrality. There is also a bit of a monopoly over popular protocols, esp. when it comes to Microsoft control over windows/edge and google search/chrome.
I'll point out that the 1st Amendment implications of regulating hosting are much less severe than the implications over regulating moderation on sites themselves.
Different people have different ideas about where to draw these lines: I personally am fairly skeptical about requiring hosting services to carry content, I think that has a lot more implications than people realize and I think that autonomy over how people manage computers and what content they serve is something we should try very hard to protect.
On the other hand I was initially skeptical of network neutrality back when it was first entering the public debate, but ended up completely changing my views and supporting it pretty much wholesale, I think that there's decent historical evidence that Title 2 classification didn't harm Internet innovation last time we tried it (in fact, the opposite happened, innovation exploded), and also I think there's much stronger evidence that service providers are actually a natural monopoly and could be treated like a public service. And I think the risk of unintended consequences is much lower.
And I also support either forcing Apple to allow alternative app stores or (possibly better) just forcing them to allow alternate web browsers and to loosen restrictions on what platforms/websites apps can tell the user about, so that PWAs can start making progress again on iOS and browsers can start to fill in the gaps in their platform -- which obviously is a restriction of their rights, I just think the benefits heavily outweigh the downsides.
My feeling is that every time we go deeper down the chain and closer to the "bare metal" of how the Internet works, it becomes a little bit safer to regulate neutrality. We have a lot of low-level changes we can make to the Internet that could go a lot further towards correcting some of the actual flaws that the Internet has, rather than just trying to regulate symptoms of those flaws.
The implications of FAANG moderation are only so serious because FAANG companies control so much of the market. It is better to actually fix that problem rather than to try and slap a band-aide on top of it (especially when that band-aide might carry a lot of unintended consequences).
So would you be happy to see ISIS recruiting videos in your feeds? What about your children's? I would consider the calls for free speech much more believable if they had been made when ISIS accounts were blocked. However, people only started calling out when it affected white supremacists or conspiracy theories popular with a portion of the white conservative constituency.
This tells me that most people are quite happy with limits on free speech, just not "their side".
Yeah but Twitter just isn't that relevant. And social media is a many-dimensional gradient of often questionable value.
Leaving FB properties, for example, is actually pretty nice when you've hit a certain spot in your life. Some forums give me much more than FB ever did. HN is more useful. There isn't some necessary set of social media sites everyone has to have.
If I didn't have a sewer in my city they would throw their shit on the streets like they did 150 years ago.
If I didn't have social media absolutely nothing happens. It doesn't become a public safety issue...in fact the public will be better off for it.
Electricity and Sewer can and will be cutoff if you do not follow the terms of service. If the electric company discovers that you do not have a circuit breaker you will be cutoff.
Sure, but the terms of service cannot legally include such things as "You have political opinions we dislike" as a valid reason for terminating service.
Why would they? They are not providing a service for sharing opinions.
Twitter is a service for sharing your opinions with the public. Obviously terms of service are going to include limits around your ability to share your opinions. If the service had no terms, that would mean that you could post 1 million spam replies to every single tweet anyone made.
Similarly Twitter's TOS shouldn't include anything around electricity usage.
Which website contains “you have political opinions we dislike” as a valid reason for terminating service? Unless you are arguing that threats of violence are valid political opinions.
What's interesting is that this is a new manifestation of the free speech argument, from new social and political quarters. Prior to this version of the free speech debate, the defenders of free speech would, say, donate to ACLU, oppose laws that criminalize protests, express concern over authoritarian countries jailing reporters, oppose prosecution of whistleblowers, oppose consolidation of corporate media, etc.
But this new constituency emerged after events like Gamergate and Charlottesville protests, and they show up to defend participants in events like those but can't be mobilized to become active in other issues that historically have been ones where people become involved out of principle.
>such things as "You have political opinions we dislike"
If I wrote the rules, anytime someone used the phrase "political opinions you dislike" there would be a popup list for the following before you can submit your comment:
* violent incitement
* Al Qaeda and ISIS
* state sponsored misinformation campaigns run by automated bots
* coordinated messages from automated bots for marketing & brand management
* harassment
* doxxing
* defamation
* revenge porn & child porn
* vaccine misinformation
* election misinformation
* spam and phishing attacks
And next to each you can click a checkbox to indicate which ones you personally endorse being defended as protected speech, which you believe to be implicated. Then people can mouse over the part of your comment that says "political opinions", see the list of things you clicked on, and know what you are talking about.
This way we don't have to worry that you're equivocating between garden variety political topics (e.g. the economy, taxes) and all the other stuff when you say "political opinions you dislike."
So yeah, there's a pretty strong case to be made that certain internet companies are like that. Can you survive without social media? Sure, but you can also survive without sewer. It's just a lot harder to live a normal life.