Regulating Social Media

Letter to the editor in yesterday's NY Times:

To the Editor:

Re “Justices Mull State Laws Constraining Social Media” (Business, Feb. 27):

Conservative politicians need to get their story straight regarding the regulation of social media platforms. At the end of January Republicans, such as Senator Josh Hawley, were demanding that Meta’s C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, apologize to parents for failing to protect children from harmful content.

However, this week conservatives from Texas and Florida argued that social media platforms should not be able to choose what content goes onto their platforms; the states believe that social media should have to publish all messages, regardless of the content.

Luckily, the justices of the Supreme Court seemed skeptical of the two states’ laws, which would open the floodgates of misinformation, hate speech and unimaginably harmful speech that could lead to suicide, eating disorders and even terrorist attacks.

If we want a society in which people are protected from harmful information and government censorship, we have to allow (and even demand) that private social media companies continue to develop strict guidelines that determine what is proper or improper to put on their websites.

Of course those guidelines should not censor views based on politics, but on whether the information is truthful and whether its potential harm outweighs its benefits. These decisions are not always easy, but newspapers such as this one do it every day.

Adam Michels

San Francisco