Well traditional publishers are responsible for the content of what shows up in their medium. Nobody would argue that the NYT shouldn't be responsible for what op-eds they publish.
New media outlets/websites do have a carve-out in the law to not be responsible for what people post there, presumably because "they (the platform) don't really have control over what people post" which is largely true.
But it's only largely true as long as new media outlet/platform isn't doing editorial work ala deciding which op-eds to show everyone and which ones to bury. But, their algorithms are de-facto editorial policy.
When you only saw updates from your friends or friends-of-friends or whatever there was no editorial policy because THEY didn't decide what you saw, YOU did. YOU were in charge of what you saw by who you associated with. The algorithm was a 1:1 correlation between your friends and what you saw.
That is no longer the case. My Facebook feed is at least 70% not updates from my friends but rather random crap that FB decides to show me. That's much closer to NYT deciding which articles/op-eds to put into the paper than it is running some kind of "people post what they want and find what they want" thing like the forums of the old days were.
Will a new law get written? I don't know. Will the tech companies allow you algorithmic choice to try and avoid getting regulated? I don't know. But there's a lot of latent discontent around how corrosive social media is by constantly stoking outrage/anger/whatever. I don't think it would necessarily be good if they got regulated but to me it's absolutely believable that it could happen.
New media outlets/websites do have a carve-out in the law to not be responsible for what people post there, presumably because "they (the platform) don't really have control over what people post" which is largely true.
But it's only largely true as long as new media outlet/platform isn't doing editorial work ala deciding which op-eds to show everyone and which ones to bury. But, their algorithms are de-facto editorial policy.
When you only saw updates from your friends or friends-of-friends or whatever there was no editorial policy because THEY didn't decide what you saw, YOU did. YOU were in charge of what you saw by who you associated with. The algorithm was a 1:1 correlation between your friends and what you saw.
That is no longer the case. My Facebook feed is at least 70% not updates from my friends but rather random crap that FB decides to show me. That's much closer to NYT deciding which articles/op-eds to put into the paper than it is running some kind of "people post what they want and find what they want" thing like the forums of the old days were.
Will a new law get written? I don't know. Will the tech companies allow you algorithmic choice to try and avoid getting regulated? I don't know. But there's a lot of latent discontent around how corrosive social media is by constantly stoking outrage/anger/whatever. I don't think it would necessarily be good if they got regulated but to me it's absolutely believable that it could happen.