This isn't a first amendment problem. This is what an antitrust problem looks like in the information age.

Privately-run communication channels have always been arbiters of truth. Fanzines and newsletters chose what to publish. The town supermarket chose what flyers it would allow on its bulletin board. The local book store chose what books and magazines it would sell. Social clubs imposed standards on their membership. And this has always been (at least arguably) both their right and their duty.

The problem is not that Facebook does this. Unless and until they seek some form of common carrier status, they continue to retain the same curatorial rights as pretty much any other private organization that isn't a telecom. The problem is that the town bookstore is gone, the town grocery store no longer has a bulletin board, the Masonic temple and the Elks club have been converted to condos, and we have generally allowed the available media for disseminating information to consolidate into a worldwide oligarchy, with Facebook as its most powerful member. The problem is that my mom gets almost all her information about the outside world, including what's happening in her local community, from Facebook, and I honestly don't know where else she can go.

And that's a problem even if Facebook doesn't try to actively arbitrate truth, because you'd still have all the other problems: The tying of access to information to an abusive monetization policy. The tying of most opportunities for community engagement to an abusive monetization policy. The single, easy target for astroturfing and political manipulation. The way that lies and misinformation generally have to be left to spread like wildfire because you can't do anything about it without people complaining about free speech.

Yes, you have it exactly. Facebook is used as if it was a the utility for information dissemination but it is run as a publisher with editorial license to suppress and boost whatever it wants. This is a new and unholy combination that should be explicitly considered in the law.

Best comment in this whole thread. While people war over the morality of Facebook Inc. banning speech is disfavors from it's own platform, most people aren't addressing the fact that Facebook shouldn't hold such a market position in the first place.

If you're treating FB as the arbiter of truth, that's a you problem.

The internet allows a wealth of information, and you should not trust FB as the arbiter of information anymore than you should absolutely-without-question trust Washington Post, Buzzfeed News or the freaking Daily Stormer.

FB 'censoring' some ridiculously unscientific and dangerous information, like COVID19 disinformation, doesn't completely hide that. You can still find it out there, but you have to look for it.

I would agree it opens up a door. You censor one thing, you think it might be worth censoring another thing and so on. But 'slippery slope' is a logical fallacy for a reason, and this disinformation is an inherently difficult problem, we can't just look to easy answers like "don't allow censorship."

Like the physical epidemic, there will be false positives and false negatives. The idea that masks would help was never ludicrous, but it was disreccomended for bad reasons. The "virus escaped from a bio-lab" theory is still rather lacking in evidence, which may be very hard to find, but that doesn't actually affect how to treat it. The "virus is spread by 5G" is both wrong and getting masts burnt down. The "virus is a hoax" is extremely likely to get a lot of people killed.

(Does anyone have a definitive "masks will not help" statement from the WHO? Rather than a "masks should not be worn" one)

The point is that FB has a disproportionate influence over speech and it should not be trusted with that sort of power (no one should really, but least of all an unelected, unaccountable, for-profit organization).