but we shouldn’t be giving all ideas privileged platforms
These platforms are not owned by the government or by some other representative organization. Fox, for example, is owned by Rupert Murdoch - it’s his platform to give voice to whatever ideas he wants to.
Most you can do (without outright censorship) is restrict them from using the word “news”. Which… I don’t think is going to be very effective. They’ll just do this whole “we can’t call ourselves news because the government doesn’t want you to know what we are going to tell you” shtick and their audience will believe them even more for that.
Not every private company can just do anything. ITAR still applies to SpaceX, the military industrial complex still wants political control over it’s suppliers, telecom corps still need to adhere to network standards, and COPPA was applied to YouTube (and they dealt with that terribly).
As much as capitalism wants to push everything as far as the system will bear, we can change that. We can say that social platforms need special care, or government officials need to be held to a higher standard. The issue at this point is political will, wich is growing in many directions at the moment.
The problem with specifically controlling speech is that we don’t have any system unbiased enough to be responsible for such a broad aspect of society. Some specific cases with some general rules might be useful though, but again I don’t trust our current systems to make good rules. This is all speculation on how to prevent public manipulation, and it probably won’t work well when used to root it out once established.
