The only solution is federal ownership of the physical infrastructure of the internet in the US - then the first amendment would apply without question. Due to the ineptitude of the Federal government and its own corruption, I doubt anyone wants to go down this path. But it is the simple fix.
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Psychical ownership only means the government will have the power to control or suppress speech, rather than just big tech doing it. Technically that should be against the first amendment but we know how the constitution doesn’t matter to the swamp, regardless of party (although one is worse than the other).
What needs to happen is that these companies should not have loop holes that allow them to be protected from the legal scrutiny of their actions by private citizens as if they were mere platforms/service providers/conduits while having the liberty to take editorial actions on what gets through in their service like publishers do.
It’s the perfect storm of Lose/Lose scenario for the people.
Either they should be on the hook for allowing all reasonable content so that they are protected from what gets published on their platforms by their users, or they should be declared publishers themselves and held accountable for their choice of what is published!
It's too late now to just allow them to become publishers. They've monopolized their segments.
Anti trust action is needed.
You mean like the Post Office? Not a great idea.
The physical structure isn't the problem here, anyway. That's already covered the same why phone calls are. at&t, verizon can't block your calls because they don't like you, or the person you called. The internet is what is provided by your ISP and what connects you to Facebook. Facebook is not 'the internet', anymore than your home computer is. Let the USPS decide what is the internet that they should own, and it will (eventually) include your home computer as well as Facebooks computers.
Just remove section 230 protections, and let folks sue Twitter/Facebook for what they publish. Sue again for defamation/libel for calling something fake when they refuse to publish it.
Prosecute Zuck and Jack for lying to Congress. That would help and be better than having to pay them billions for the eminent domain seizure of their companies.
What it means is that anything the federal government did that affected speech would have to be content neutral. So if the US government owned the physical network that forms the internet, it could impose on Facebook, Google and anyone else that operates on the internet a requirement for neutrality.
Of course the problem is that we can all imagine a sclerotic bureaucracy something like the post office running what needs to be a dynamic and fast moving system.
Facebook at present is simply a private company running a private exchange of messages and advertising and is not subject to the first amendment. They can be as slanted as they want to be.
Google uses proprietary algorithms that influence how visible information is. They can place their thumb on the scales of information flow and it is not at all apparent to users.
If federal ownership is not the solution then regulation via something akin to a public utility model could be done. But I would fear the bureaucracy established to regulate.