On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech - whether or not we agree with them?
That has always been the history of media, see Hearst, Murdoch, Mercer, etc. The democracy of the early Internet was the exception from billionaires being in charge, not the norm.
Hearst used to be the voice of print media for decades.
The situation in radio is the same as it is on the internet: a few publicly-owned companies own a supermajority of the FM airwaves. If you wonder why you can change the station and hear the same song simultaneously on 5 different stations, it's because they're all owned by the same company.
In TV, for most of the past 2 decades, conservative billionaires have owned more than 75% of the public TV stations in the U.S. and Australia, and have been using that bully pulpit on behalf of conservatives during that time. Murdoch especially was instrumental in providing Trump (and other extremist candidates like Cruz) thousands of hours of free coverage during the 2016 campaign. The ownership groups would regularly interfere with local media and demand they either air or avoid topics as directed by ownership. Where was conservative outrage over billionaires deciding speech during this time?
I think one difference is that people inhabit and create social media in a way that they didn't with print and TV. A significant percentage of our lives is spent in these de factor public squares.
As a media company that 'creates' tweets to be displayed on CNN, etc., or read by logged out users, the analogy to traditional media is more straightforward.
That has always been the history of media, see Hearst, Murdoch, Mercer, etc. The democracy of the early Internet was the exception from billionaires being in charge, not the norm.
Hearst used to be the voice of print media for decades.
The situation in radio is the same as it is on the internet: a few publicly-owned companies own a supermajority of the FM airwaves. If you wonder why you can change the station and hear the same song simultaneously on 5 different stations, it's because they're all owned by the same company.
In TV, for most of the past 2 decades, conservative billionaires have owned more than 75% of the public TV stations in the U.S. and Australia, and have been using that bully pulpit on behalf of conservatives during that time. Murdoch especially was instrumental in providing Trump (and other extremist candidates like Cruz) thousands of hours of free coverage during the 2016 campaign. The ownership groups would regularly interfere with local media and demand they either air or avoid topics as directed by ownership. Where was conservative outrage over billionaires deciding speech during this time?