Free Speech Isn’t a Barrier to Regulating Social Media. Profits Are.

You can’t use a mega-sound system to hold a political rally in front of a hospital in the middle of the night. You can’t pack a theater so full of people that no one can reach the fire exits without being trampled. In the physical world, these kinds of noise control and fire safety regulations uneventfully coexist with our First Amendment free speech and free assembly rights. They’re accepted as common-sense ways to keep us safe and preserve our sanity.

The same ideas can be applied to social media. By reverse engineering the noise and lack of crowd control that has overrun social media platforms, we can make the internet a more peaceful, reliable, less polarizing place.

And we can do it without the government policing speech. In fact, Congress does not have to do anything. It doesn’t even need to touch Section 230, the now infamous 1996 law that gives social media platforms immunity for the harmful content — from healthcare hoaxes to election misinformation to Russian and Chinese state-sponsored propaganda — that has created a world of chaos and division, where so many people don’t believe even the most basic truths. Instead, the Federal Trade Commission and other consumer protection regulators around the world could enforce the contracts the platforms already have with their users.