it's a combination of the right to free expression and free association, not just for journalists, but for everyone. I should not be prevented from hearing things i might be interested to hear, or from hearing things from people i 've chosen to associate with because someone 3rd party thinks they re not nice.
No, that's patently ridiculous. The internet is a new medium; things scale so vastly differently here. Your proposal is literally impossible to enforce at the scale of major platforms. To force everyone to choose between "hands off, no moderation" and "you are responsible for all content" is a thinly veiled attempt to force the big players to not moderate, and therefore host extremist content - because they literally can't review everything.
I actually tend to agree that it s a bad solution (its discussed in a subthread here) but i like to entertain all options. The real cause is the lack of competition for the few major platforms. I wish G+ had taken off.
What legal standards are you referring to? Newspapers and media are not held to additional obligations than what a normal person has – e.g. it's illegal for anyone to commit slander, or violate obscenity laws. The fact that a publisher can be held liable for publishing illegal content is not what gives them the "right" to edit and censor their own publication.
Why? A newspaper is composed almost entirely of content that the paper is paying journalists and writers to produce whereas a social media site is almost entirely composed of content posted by individuals, how does it make any sense that a platform becomes a newspaper because they ban some content from being posted on their platform?
Newspapers aren't held responsible for the stuff people post on their comment sections either. Otherwise they'd have long since been sued into the ground, considering the sheer amount of bile exercised in said comment sections.
