I don't think Trump's lawsuit is going to do it, and it's a job for the legislature anyway.
The conflict between free speech and the First Amendment arises when these private companies use the First Amendment as both a shield and a sword selectively to censor free speech. The conflict becomes most acute when a small number of private companies are powerful enough to essentially shut down the marketplace of ideas — which the First Amendment was designed to keep open — to certain views.
The argument for allowing some regulation of these companies is strengthened by the fact that they already are subject to regulations that benefit them, namely Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that exempts them from certain liabilities to which other media are subject. They welcome this positive governmental regulation while understandably opposing negative regulation. But being exempted from some government regulation does not, by itself, turn a private institution into a state actor. Major League Baseball has been granted a legislative exemption from antitrust laws, yet it continues to be treated as private for other purposes.
Congress can, of course, ameliorate the problem it caused when it granted tech platforms such broad, unconstitutional exemption from defamation and other liabilities.It could and should limit the exemptions only to media platforms that do not censor lawful speech that they deem offensive. But the Big Tech companies are lobbying hard against any such limitation, and it's unlikely to be enacted.
...
The hard question is whether the proposed remedy — giving the government power over private media companies — is more dangerous than the disease of too much censorship power in the hands of too few unaccountable media oligarchs.
It seems to me that any forum or social media site that censors
only unlawful speech quickly devolves into a cespool of advertising, spam, abuse, trolling, porn, and off-topic nonsense. I think the moderation on this forum strikes an acceptable balance, but it obviously requires moderation (
censorship!) to keep it from going south.
Are there any proposals out there that strike a good balance and effectively deal with these problems?