Part of the problem here is that @mikecurtis is actually using the wrong terminology. The broadcast media are not considered to be public utilities. For the purposes of government control and FCC regulation, the term applied to communications media like radio and television is “common carrier.” The internet as a whole was also classified as a common carrier about six years ago, for the purposes of net neutrality, but as people probably know, net neutrality was repealed by the FCC a couple of years ago.
I don’t agree with @mikecurtis about the Florida law, and I don’t really think that social media should be regulated like common carriers, but I think that some folks in this thread are being a bit unfair to him regarding the nature of the debate. There is little doubt that the past few years, in particular, have seen a growing and increasingly rigorous debate over the nature of speech on the internet and the extent to which private companies can (or should) be forced by government to control or limit or regulate what private individuals can say on their platform. Just a few weeks ago, the National Constitution Center’s We The People podcast, which focuses on constitutional law, had an episode on this very topic: President Trump, Justice Thomas, and the Future of Social Media.
Also, I’d be interested to know if any of the people jumping on @mikecurtis in this thread have, in the past, taken a position on whether Facebook and other social media companies can, or should, be compelled by the government to monitor advertisements and/or posts on their platforms for accuracy, and delete factually inaccurate advertisements and/or posts? Because if you have no problem with the government telling Facebook or Twitter that it has a legal obligation to remove misleading or false information, then I’m not sure that it’s very much different for the government to tell social media companies that they have to adopt certain consistent rules for deplatforming political candidates.
I’m not sure if it was anyone in this thread, but a couple of years back when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was grilling Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s policies, there were quite a lot of people on my side of the political fence (i.e., the liberal/progressive/left side) agreeing with her, arguing that social media should be required to remove factually inaccurate information, and that if they failed, the government could and should step in to regulate them.
One of the interesting things about the whole social media debate over the past few years is that calls for government control and regulation are coming from both sides of the political spectrum, although with a slightly different focus. Calls to regulate social media or limit Section 230 have comefrom both liberals and lefties like Joe Biden and AOC, as well as right-wing authoritarians like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson. They all have slightly different reasons for their arguments, but for all of them, it seems to boil down to, “I want these companies to limit access for people and viewpoints that I don’t like, and/or be compelled to provide access for people and viewpoints that I do like.”