Should the government regulate the use of social media for political campaigns?

Human's Argument:

Human's Argument:

Yes because If not lead to political violence trump proves. Democracy is damaged by political violence. There is no net benefit because outweighed by political violence. Political violence causes gov collapse causes global Econ collapse and causes nuke war. No adv to not regulate because you can still campaign, and slippery slope arg is logical fallacy reject. And regulation solves everything

Human's Argument:

Imposing government control over social media political speech would be an overreach and violation of free speech. Campaigns have adapted to modern forms of communication, but the principles of democracy remain unchanged. Restricting social media would hamper valuable political debate. Regulation is also unlikely to achieve its goals. History shows transparency and ethics in elections improve most when society self-corrects, not due to state coercion. And policies that curb political social media use will face fierce legal challenges under free speech laws. Furthermore, regulations like banning micro-targeting or fact-checking political posts pose their own ethical dilemmas. Government censors determining truth in campaigns would be dangerous. And many voters appreciate micro-targeted content surfacing issues specific to them. There are better ways to achieve ethical social media use. The platforms themselves should offer controls improving transparency, fact-checking, and user agency over data and targeting. And the public should push campaigns to self-regulate by rewarding honest politicians with votes. In open democracies, the antidote to concerning new forms of persuasion is a more engaged and discerning electorate, not expanded government control over speech. Attempting to regulate social media campaigns would undermine the integrity of our free elections far more than it would improve them.

Human's Argument:

President Trump recently complained that Google searches are biased against Republicans and conservatives. Many conservatives argue that Facebook and Google are monopolies seeking to restrict conservative speech. In contrast, many on the left complain that large social media platforms fostered both Trump’s election in 2016 and violence in Charlottesville in 2017. Many on both sides believe that government should actively regulate the moderation of social media platforms to attain fairness, balance, or other values. Yet American law and culture strongly circumscribe government power to regulate speech on the internet and elsewhere. Regulations of social media companies might either indirectly restrict individual speech or directly limit a right to curate an internet platform. The First Amendment offers strong protections against such restrictions. Congress has offered additional protections to tech companies by freeing them from most intermediary liability for speech that appears on their platforms. The U.S. Supreme Court has decided that private companies in general are not bound by the First Amendment. However, some activists support new efforts by the government to regulate social media. Although some platforms are large and dominant, their market power can disintegrate, and alternatives are available for speakers excluded from a platform. The history of broadcast regulation shows that government regulation tends to support rather than mitigate monopolies. Others worry that social media leads to “filter bubbles” that preclude democratic deliberation. But the evidence for filter bubbles is not strong, and few remedies exist that are compatible with the ConstitutionSpeech on social media directly tied to violence—for example, terrorism—may be regulated by government, but more expansive efforts are likely unconstitutional. Concern about “interference” in U.S. elections glosses over the incoherence of current policies. Some foreign speech, online and off, is legal if the relationship of a speaker and a foreign power is disclosed. Preventing harms caused by “fake news” or “hate speech” lies well beyond the jurisdiction of the government; tech firms appear determined to deal with such harms, leaving little for the government to doIn August 2017, a political protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned into violent clashes between extremists, leading to one person being killed. In the aftermath, several tech companies denied service to neo‐​Nazis whose extreme rhetoric was thought to foster that violence. Denied a forum, the extremists retreated from the most widely used part of the internet to the dark web. Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, one of the companies that drove the National Socialists out, argued later that businesses lack the legitimacy to govern speech on their forums.1 He suggested that most people see government as the proper authority to suppress speech related to violence. This policy analysis follows up on Prince’s comments by evaluating the legitimacy of government regulation of speech on the internet. We shall focus primarily on potential policies for the United States.2 Our effort advances in two parts. First, we establish a starting point for our analysis. We show that the values and practices of the public demonstrate a legitimate but quite limited role for government regulation of speech on the internet and elsewhere. The public and policy­makers prefer private governance of speech. Those who wish to introduce new public regulation of social media must overcome this presumption for the private. In the second part, we show that arguments for new public efforts fail to do that. We find that private content moderators have already taken effective and innovative steps to deal with some of these problems. It is private content moderators, not elected or appointed officials, who should have the power to regulate speech on social media.