Here's the point I think keeps getting missed in these discussions: monopoly.
Why are we worried about social media? Because it's a system made by and for a small number of companies. We worry about how well these companies will bear the responsibility that new technology creates for them. Why do they have that responsibility in the first place? Why doesn't that responsibility belong to you or me or any of the other ~5 billion individuals who participate in this system? Why can't we have a piece of that responsibility? The answer is monopoly.
Our society got into this situation on purpose. It's in our laws, enshrined as a human right. The right to monopolize ideas. The right to intellectual property.
It all started out as a way to game the system. People saw that free information was incompatible with capitalism, so they invented a game that would resolve the incentives. So long as enough people participated in this game, the edges of the system would balance out to humanity's benefit.
Whether or not this game worked is a matter of perspective, but what is definitely clear is that the system that IP was originally designed to solve has fundamentally changed. Our ability to share ideas has grown exponentially. It costs practically nothing to share information today. Information can be shared by any person at any time any number of times to any number of people, and this can even be done anonymously. Participation in the game of IP has been an ever-growing problem, and no amount of threat or propaganda can keep it in line.
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Ideas are not the only thing that social media companies monopolize. The next presents an even greater responsibility: moderation.
Social media moderation may be the most significant failure society has ever seen. The results of mismanaged moderation have fallen everywhere on the spectrum from petty argument to genocide. We all know that moderation is incredibly difficult, and nearly impossible to scale; yet we allow a handful of companies to manage it on their own! Billions of us participate in social media, and billions of us have zero leverage over what ideas and narratives we participate with.
This system is fundamentally broken. The most perversely incentivized party (the company who wants to make money from participation) has monopolized the responsibility for the entire system! How could we ever expect them to get it right? We're over here worried about the tools they use to do the job - which is certainly its own problem - but why did we ever let them have the job in the first place? The tools are not the core problem. The core problem is at the center of this system: it's the fact that this system has a centralized core in the first place.
We don't just need to liberate the exchange of ideas. We need to liberate the responsibility that comes with sharing them.