But equally, if it was published in a national newspaper, no-one would question the newspaper's liability. What we have with social media is a platform where anyone can post whatever they want, but also a platform that engages in editorial decisions about that content. It selects content to show you based on that it thinks you would like, so by definition, the social media company have curated Joey Barton's post and chosen to put it in front of certain people.
The fact that all of this happens automatically based on some algorithm is neither here nor there, in my opinion. If the Daily Mail had published something libellous, they would not be allowed to point out that everything was checked by some AI lawyer, and 'taken down as soon as we were notified,' as a defence. But somehow, these social media companies have successfully convinced everyone that it's somehow impractical to properly moderate their platforms. The biggest companies the world has ever seen, yet we're led to believe that they couldn't afford to employ more people than a single Volkswagen factory. They could moderate things properly, but it would eat into their shareholder profits. The stupidest thing every government did with social media is to allow them to this legal status of basically being the paper the newspaper is printed on, rather than the actual publisher. I get that you've got to have a certain amount of leeway and a slightly different legal structure when it's user-generated content, but that doesn't mean that we can't mandate things, for example, certain numbers of real human moderators, and timely takedowns of illegal/libellous content, with real penalties for failing to do so.
