"These bans end the pretense that privately owned social media companies are the heirs to the town square"

In the American Spectator, Dominic Green gives us more information about how Facebook operates.

This is commercial greed and moral laziness, masked in a defense of the First Amendment. Which would be fine — in fact, business as usual for Silicon Valley — were it not that Facebook and the other social media giants practice selective discrimination about who gets to lie on their platforms.

The professional irritants expelled from Facebook aren’t equally ‘dangerous’. Milo Yiannopoulos is about as dangerous as a plastic spork. Laura Loomer protests, with good reason, that she hasn’t breached Facebook’s terms of use. Paul Joseph Watson’s speech, from what I can tell, is mostly harmless, and his dubious material falls well inside the speech that Facebook wishes to protect: statements that are ‘wrong or inaccurate, even when they are offensive’. The only conclusion is that Facebook has banned them not because they lie, but because their lies are the wrong ones, told from the wrong political perspective. Hence CNN and the Washington Post characterizing Farrakhan as ‘far-right’. Hence Linda Sarsour and all the other left-wing inciters and frauds are still welcome on social media, and will be so forever.

These bans end the pretense that privately owned social media companies are the heirs to the town square, with the implied rights of First Amendment protection. This selective silencing proves that Facebook & Co. are closer to private parklands, not public commons. Our use of them for leisure is a form of labor for the landowners, and the chance to monetize our personal information is in the gift of the proprietors. And if they don’t like what you say, they can arbitrarily expel you.

In other words, the more the social media companies — forgive the obscenity — ‘curate’ their content, the closer they get to being traditional publishers, de facto if not de jure. Facebook might not care about the facts, but it does care about the law. And the law, sooner or later, will care about the social media companies. They built the pipelines that spew incitement out of our phones and computers. They profit from them, even when their platforms disseminate the foulest kind of celebrity, the livestreaming terrorist. They broke civil discourse and the news business, and now they own it.

A body of law already exists for regulating Facebook’s problem. Legislation redefining social media companies as publishers will bring them under the First Amendment. This is what they fear, because they will then be responsible for what they publish, just like a newspaper. That’s why they’re donating so generously to politicians and lobbying so lavishly in Washington, DC: to make sure it never happens.

Read more here.