Recently Facebook and Twitter have made decisions about continuing to ban the most recent ex-president of the US from posting on their systems. Certain political quarters have raised the possibility of breaking up social media concerns due to antitrust issues. There is a third consideration that is more far-reaching.
In the case of Facebook, to my knowledge its recent pronouncements about the usage of the ex-president's account constitute the third occurance of FB joining (or inserting itself into) its users' conversations, the first two being 2020 election procedure and Covid-19 treatment procedure. I'm not as familiar with Twitter. Using just FB as an indication, we're largely in uncharted territory - but not totally.
Over a decade ago, MySpace was the heavyweight social media platform. When it was purchased by a large advertising concern, many more sponsored content items appeared on user pages (crowding user content). This caused many users to begin searching for platform alternatives. Such a change could happen again and we should now be aware of that possibility.
[Additional note: I wasn't a heavy user of Google+ but that strikes me as what could have been a turnkey Facebook alternative had it been allowed to continue. Of course, hindsight is 20/20. Anyway, we're presented with two bad developments, in that big tech is accused of cancelling users and opponents of big tech could be accused of intending to restrict big tech's freedom of speech. My only advice would be to protect the first amendment above all in this range of issues and let the chips fall where they may. If both sides in this contest merely intend as a solution that the other side's opinions be throttled, then both sides are incorrect.]
