First of all, breakups don't always work. The government broke up Bell into a bunch of Baby Bells and everyone still had to deal with a monopoly. They just had different names from each other.

What really should be happening is, we should be treating Facebook - and Twitter, and Instagram - like what they are: Public spaces. Instead of demanding that they be accountable for what people put on them, we should demand specifically that they not.

The argument that they're a private company and can control speech no longer holds water. First of all, in today's world, if you don't have access to social media, you don't have access to the public square. Second, many of the people saying "they're a private company and can do what they want" are the same ones demanding net neutrality. Uh, if a private company can censor speech, it certainly can throttle it.

In Marsh v. Alabama, the Jehovah's Witnesses sued for the right to distribute literature on private property, and won. Why did they win? Because the private property was a company town, with streets, a post office, fire department, etc. The court held that if your private property functions like a public space, you have to extend public rights.

That's what Facebook is. We have every damn right to stand on the street corner and hand out hateful garbage and fake news. That people would do it on Facebook instead is no different anymore. And it's chilling, the idea that the government should have an agency dedicated to what you can and can't say on social media. If it's illegal, it's illegal on social media or off it. And the same goes for legal speech.

Social media's a toxic-ass place, and I don't have an easy answer for how to clean it up. Facebook self-censoring, and government breakups, are not the answer, though. Whatever the answer is, it can't be an infringement on real free speech. Louis Farrakhan is a piece of shit, but silencing him in the public square is more toxic than every word that's ever come out of his hateful mouth.