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- Social media should be regulated in a similar way to other forms of media, while still focusing on the fact that "online expression requires a different approach from that accorded to the traditional mass media" (Rowbottom 490).

- Social media allows elites to have a major influence over specific sectors of the population, causing the spread of misinformation to have drastic effects. "[Media elites] serve a role that can help expose viewpoints to a wide audience and to influential opinion formers. Their expression has much greater opportunity to persuade people or influence politics than the expression of most other individuals" (Rowbottom 503).

-Since a handful of companies own the majority of social media outlets, individual companies' regulation choices can decide what is allowed to be spread across civil society. "These groups argue that big media companies would grow even bigger ... [and] would then have even more control over what views [and] opinions ... the nation's citizenry would or would not see" (Dukes 4).

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The spread of misinformation of many forms on social media should be more heavily regulated by the government, as current policy leaves the responsibility of content moderation in the hands of tech companies and their own policies.

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- "Targeted Advertising"
- "Understanding Social Media as a Weapon"

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Despite the importance of freedom of speech and of the press to our democracy, government media regulation policies  protecting Americans from the dangers of social media are possible and necessary in our modern world.

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- "Media Freedom and Political Debate in the Digital Era"
- "The FCC and Media Regulation"

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- "Social Media and Online Speech"
- "Systemic Social Media Regulation"

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"Social Media Sway"
"Sharing New Responsibilities in a Digital Age"

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"Regulating Online Content Moderation"
"The First Amendment in Cyberspace"

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- Information shared through social media has a strong potential to incite violence and inspire hateful rhetoric among certain topics. "The role of social media and online speech in civil society has come under heightened scrutiny. National security experts say [this violence] was fomented in large part on social media platforms" (Siripuraru, Merrow 1).

- Social media companies often choose to impose regulation on posts that have the potential to incite violence solely on the post's effects on the company's profitability and public image.
*LONG QUOTE*
"For instance, when YouTube considers the removal of a terrorist recruitment video, it is considering a First Amendment question and exercising quasi-judicial power. It is obvious that managerial and gubernatorial interests can overlap. YouTube's profitability, corporate image, long-term viability, and capacity to avoid regulation depend on satisfactory operation of its quasi-judicial function. If YouTube fails to remove the video, its corporate image may decline, its users may go elsewhere, and the state may impose costly regulations. Inasmuch as managerial and gubernatorial interests strongly converge, there exists a good case for self-regulation. (118) Where they diverge, rules are desirable so long as their benefits exceed their costs." (Fagan 11)

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"Today's venues such as Twitter offer a direct route for delivering a message to a large target audience, often with little context for evaluating the message's veracity" (Ehrenberg 22).

- Astroturfing campaigns have a large political impact as they attempt to mislead the public into believing that their thoughts and beliefs are shared by the majority.  "Astroturfing campaigns can give the impression that a discussion is truly representative of what a lot of people are thinking" (Ehrenberg 23). (Importance of bot removal)

- Social media exacerbates political divisions that already exist. "In recent elections in Brazil, India, and Israel, social media have been increasingly used to purvey false information. Misinformation does not create unseen social divides, instead, it is used to fuel existing tensions between political, social, or religious groups. It will, therefore, serve populist campaigns more than others" (Heldt 345). These campaigns are a direct threat to democracy.

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- The spread of unverified information can cause a significant impact on public security and public health. "Examining a sample of 225 pieces of misinformation posted between January and the end of March, found that while more than half of the content was either deleted or labeled with warnings, significant amounts of such content remained in circulation" (Marechal 13).
- The lack of limits on social media allow it to be used as a radicalization method for groups that threaten public security. "The exploitation of information and communication systems by terrorist groups has always been a vital component of their operations. Communicating their ideological agendas has always constituted, and continues to constitute, a core purpose for undertaking terrorist violence" (West 9).

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- Some argue that removing misinformation and other dangerous sectors of social media constitute a violation of the free speech portion of the First Amendment, and suggest opposition against content moderation in exchange for a widely unregulated platform. However, "any official move to limit content moderation on social media platforms will be challenged, both in policy discussions and in formal constitutional litigation, as an abridgment of the platform operators' own "speech" rights as editors or
curators" (Langvardt 1364).