I don't see how cancel culture can be ended under current law. Too many people enjoy being part of a mob. Either we recognize that Twitter is a "standing" mob that can be wherever mob action will have an effect, or we don't. We cannot make Twitter not serve the mob. But we can cancel twitter.

My solution to Twitter is to make it a publisher for legal purposes. Yes, that would destroy its business model, but I don't really give a flying fuck whether Twitter survives as a business. If Simon and Schuster can't hide behind "We have so many authors," why can Twitter? How does publishing promiscuously become OK? I don't know whether the publisher/platform distinction was raised in the recent Big Four hearings. But it should have been.

The “platform” argument fails because it ignores an implicit fact about “platforms” that makes them useful: they require effort to use. In England, you can go to Hyde Park Corner and hold forth on damn near anything. But you have to go to Hyde Park Corner. Or, you can pay for an advertisement in a publication subject to the libel laws and subject yourself or the publication to defamation laws. Or you can go door to door or phone call to phone call to rally people for some action or other. Twitter just makes all that too easy.

Boycotting is a tried and true form of “collective bargaining,” and I would not want to lose it from the economic toolkit. But boycotts are socially useful only because they are not overused; they have historically addressed ongoing contemporary commercial behavior, not something the CEO did twenty years ago or some misguided employee did yesterday. The only thing that keeps the boycott from being overused is how difficult one is to mount. (In this regard, a boycott is like a filibuster, once Mr. Smith’s impressive resistance to bad laws, now just a few keystrokes of total obstruction.)

Platforms are valuable only if access to them is limited to those who can meet certain thresholds of seriousness. This is not a substantive test. You just have to care enough about your issue to do the work of getting others to do the work of boycotting. If there is not enough work involved, too many boycotts become, like it or not, totalitarianism, and we all suffer.

But we should make no mistake about it. Cancel culture is the natural consequence of ad-based social media having “platform” status. There is no point in protesting what natural selection selects. We need to change the selective pressure by making cancellation harder to achieve. Making Twitter a publisher seems to me the shortest route to that result.