The devil will always be in the details, but in theory it shouldn't be difficult to create regulations that would prevent Big Tech from quickly and arbitrarily banning users or suppressing content. The process of silencing users should be slow, transparent, and subject to appeal.
That's all most people really want - some assurance they won't be muzzled by partisan gangs or silenced by tech oligarchs. If the gangs and oligarchs doing this stuff leaned to the Right, no one would have any difficulty understanding these concerns or acting on them.
Of course, if the overlords of social media leaned Right, their platforms would have been effectively nationalized years ago - about 48 hours after they silenced the first prominent figure of the Left, especially if it was someone from a preferred minority group.
We shouldn't have to turn these companies into public utilities, break them up, or hyper-regulate them to establish some basic protections for users that have clearly become important in the Internet era, as we deal with the social impact of a powerful new resource.
Of course any system could be abused, but the longer, more transparent, and more exacting the process for banning users and suppressing content becomes, the more checks against abuse there are. Deplatforming and cancel culture exploded because it's too easy to silence people.
The Internet raises some fascinating social questions about *effort*, which is really a form of expense, and how reducing the amount of effort for certain goals to near-zero creates bizarre social deformations. Zero effort creates an anarchic wasteland where brute force rules.
We face so many threats to free speech now because the effort required to suppress speech has fallen to near-zero. A few people with the correct politics can whip up a cancel mob and get Big Media signal boosting overnight. A handful of tech moguls define acceptable speech.
And it all happens with blinding speed. People suddenly find themselves temporarily or permanently banned without proper warning, with little opportunity to face their accusers or contest the arbitrary judgments. There are no consequences for false accusations.
Simply slowing this process down, raising the threshold of effort needed to get someone flagged or banned, and allowing proper time to respond to allegations of speech code violations would help a lot. The slower judgments are made, the less arbitrary they become.
Information technology brings great benefits by making things easier and faster, including communications, but we should pay more attention to the alarming things that can happen when the threshold of effort for aggressive activities falls into that weird near-zero region.
Infusing even a small amount of effort into processes - like silencing people - can produce a significant increase in the quality of interactions by requiring more focus and commitment. It should be *hard* to silence people. We can do that without micromanaging Big Tech. /end
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