I do think social media is bad. And ideally, no, to the extent that any social media sites have feeds more complicated than a chronological feed of people I follow, I want the algorithms powering those feeds to be open for inspection by anyone (by law), and for regulations to be put in place so that dangerous content is never promoted on the platform just because it attracts eyeballs (and thus advertising dollars). Opaque social media algorithms are bad for society, the same way that fentanyl is bad for society, or violent crime is bad for society.

There is no precedent in human history that you can compare social-media black-box algorithms to. It's not the same as a "public square," or a newspaper, or books, or talking to friends in person. It's a new paradigm.

I would drastically prefer regulations to letting the companies police themselves, but, well, waves hands at the current environment, and what Meta did removing their content reviewers is a step in the wrong direction. The platform will get worse as a result.

In other words, the problem is free reach, not free speech. You might have heard of it -- it has recently been popularized, co-opted, and slightly twisted by Twitter to mean what is more akin to "shadowbanning" problematic accounts, but I'm saying that no one deserves free reach by default on social media.