How would you quantify and limit the "significant carrier of public speech?" Just claiming a group is a club or is too small does not seem to be a practical exemption to an effort to stop censorship on social media platforms.
The Supreme Court used a very broad brush to end segregation. Enforcing Free Speech rights on fb and twtr seems like another dangerous slope for us with the chance of equal time provisions and the like. As in, be careful what you wish for.
I've had some experience with coming up with verbiage satisfactory to a group of people, and I know crafting a law to accomplish what you wish with a minimum of side effects is not easy.
My goal in discussing the idea is to get people to think about the need for such a thing, and I have not tried to go into a lot of detail about how such a law can be constructed because I know from past experience that people will want to have input on it. I think a proper law would have to evolve from some basic ideas as people consider it and point out potential problems.
But my method for arguing on behalf of such a law uses the arbitrary number of one million users to meet the threshold of "significance."
Maybe this isn't best, and someone has a better idea for a threshold, but a million at least gives us a starting point for further discussion of the topic.
I think sites like Free Republic likely do not have a million users, while sites which are clearly becoming a threat to freedom of speech are all over a million, if not over a billion.
A system that carries public speech traffic for a billion people world wide represents a serious threat to freedom of speech if it engages in censorship, as do Facebook, Google, Twitter, and so forth.
Enforcing Free Speech rights on fb and twtr seems like another dangerous slope for us with the chance of equal time provisions and the like
More dangerous than the existing situation? I consider what we have now to be extremely dangerous in the long run. I'm not coming up with any ideas on how preventing people from censoring speech will work out worse than letting them do it.
If it's acceptable for some speech to be censored, why don't we just let the government do it?