After being celebrated for playing a central role in the Arab Spring, social-media platforms are now blamed for any outcome that traditional media outlets dislike. Growing disenchantment with social media has led to growing demands for regulation.
The pressure is now great enough that Facebook, fearful of being shackled by the state, has sought to lead the regulatory effort itself, advertising heavily to express its own support for such policies.
But what type of regulation do we need? To answer that question, we first must appreciate the transformational nature of social media, which is arguably comparable to that of the printing press in 15th-century Europe.
The printing press thus changed not only the language of the books but also the style and tenor of debate. With the printing press came the Reformation, which featured theological debates full of insults and theatre.
The Catholic establishment's reaction to this new age was multifaceted: power was recentralised in the hands of the pope; the Index of Forbidden Books was created; and the Inquisition was ramped up to protect Catholic souls from preachers of "fake knowledge".
While the printing press broke a monopoly, social media infringed on a cosy oligopoly. Before social media, everybody was free to speak, but not everybody had the right to a megaphone. While printing texts was relatively cheap, distributing them was not -- and broadcasting was even more expensive, when it was allowed at all.
As a result, access to...
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