Trump Is Confused About Social Media. He’s Not Alone. | NYT

Some timely reminders from Kara Swisher

"But let me break it down for those who have gotten used to the chaos: Social media companies are private entities that can moderate any of the content that floods their platforms. They can kick off users who violate whatever policies they have in place, change those policies anytime they like and be wildly inconsistent in how they enforce them.

That’s entirely legal under current law, which was girded by the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which said that corporations have free-speech rights, including the right not to speak. That means they cannot be forced to host dreck if they don’t want to.

That, of course, is scary to the slippery-slope crowd, who worry that a small coterie of mostly male, mostly white, mostly obscenely wealthy people are making such enormous publishing decisions for everyone. As Bret Stephens, a Times columnist, asked in the wake of the Facebook purge: “Do you trust Mark Zuckerberg and the other young lords of Silicon Valley to be good stewards of the world’s digital speech?”"

Trump Is Confused About Social Media. He’s Not Alone. | NYT