A good analogy might be the postal service. Indeed, current Internet practice depends largely on a precedent set by a law passed in the United States around 20 years ago which declared it analogous to a postal or telephone service. However, I would contend it’s more like the former than the latter. Generally, a telephone service delivers only one kind of content: peer to peer messaging. By contrast, beside letters, a postal service can deliver parcels or newspapers. Likewise, the Internet can deliver personal messages but can also deliver published material or software goods such as music or films and even computer programs. Lumping the Internet in with the things conveyed by it would be like defining everything coming through a letterbox as postal in nature.

How is this relevant to society at present? Simply this; Internet content must be treated in law as separate from the process delivering it and responsibility should be understood accordingly, making publishers accountable online as they would be offline. The postman is not responsible for a letter, or even for a magazine dropped through your door, but the letter remains a letter and the magazine a magazine. We don’t decide the magazine is a letter just because you received it through the post. There is an important difference between a letter and a magazine. One is private and the other is public. That’s an important distinction.

So-called Social Media is not entirely private. Some things on a Social Media platform might be private if set to be so, but most things by default are public in nature. It is therefore absurd to assume these platforms are not responsible for their content or that it is an infringement of Free Speech for them to be so. Free Speech applies with certain safeguards to both private communications and public ones, but those safeguards are not the same. For a letter safeguards range from the recipient refusing to respond if offended by the message or even requesting no further messages be sent, to legal sanctions for threatening or extremely abusive messages. For a magazine or newspaper the safeguards are laws relating to incitement or defamation, and the editor will need to be aware of what can and cannot be printed. These might technically be limitations of Free Speech, but they are accepted because they provide necessary protection of the Public Interest in a well-ordered society and do not go far enough to prevent legitimate discussion of theoretical issues (although I am well aware and quite concerned some recent legislation might start to erode that much-needed ability and society needs to ensure that does not happen and some so-called protections might need to be rolled back a little). However, the basic principle is sound.

I therefore suggest that, just as a newspaper or magazine’s letters page would only publish letters which appear to the editor well-argued, relevant to the readership’s interests, and not defamatory or making clearly unfounded assertions, so Social Media sites should do the same. This might break the current platforms’ business models. So be it. They have no right to an antisocial business model. Businesses must operate within the law. Business models which can only work by neglecting social responsibility are not valid models. We don’t say we can’t have laws against smuggling because it would break the smugglers’ business model. Why do we think Social Media sites should have some right to exist and be profitable without ensuring they only publish what they approve? Is that an attack on Free Speech? No more than having a newspaper editor is!

The great thing about the Internet is it enables everyone to have their own newspaper equivalent if they are prepared to put the effort in. In that, they can say what they like subject to the laws regulating published material. If no one else will publish their words they can publish their own, but they must take responsibility just as any editor should for avoiding defamation or other unlawful or illegal actions. What we do not have is a right to have anything we want to say published by a third party on our behalf with no one taking responsibility for it or to cry foul if they decline to do so. Nor do we have a right to profit from publishing anything others want to say without censure.

If so-called Social Media organisations worked to the same standards as newspapers should, they might not exist in their current form at all but, if they did, they wouldn’t produce a world where unfounded rumours spread so rapidly or violence on the scale happening in the last week is so easily organised. Either way, we’d have a calmer society with more Free Speech, for violence is no friend of Freedom. Rather, it creates the fear which prevents people daring to do or say what they want.