Moreover,
the common carriage approach isn’t a recipe for more hate speech: This problem
is a function of these platforms’ basic business model—surveillance
advertising. In the 1990s, people could express white supremacist views on
bulletin boards, but their posts wouldn’t be amplified and disseminated widely
the way they often are today.
But
today’s social media companies profit from keeping people online as much
as possible, both to sell more ads and to track users—the better to develop
more fine-grain profiles of our wants, needs, and fears. That means
incendiary content, whether conspiracy theories about the Rohingya in Myanmar, the 2020 presidential election in
the United States, or undocumented immigrants, sells. It keeps people highly engaged
and very online. Indeed, a casual examination of recent history indicates that
social media companies, at present, are not responsible stewards, but are
instead leading purveyors of hate speech.
In
addition to social media, common carriage principles could be applied to other tech
companies that hold themselves out as open to the public. For example, lawmakers
could designate cloud computing companies, such as Amazon Web Services, as common
carriers. These businesses provide an important service that is purportedly available
to all paying customers and should be operated on a nondiscriminatory basis.