Social media should not be owned by a single individual

People call for regulations of social media due to the blantant propaganda and manipulation on X by Elon. But then always say regulations would be challenged as violating the first amendment (or any free speech laws in other countries).

But honestly, I don't think we need to necessarily regulate the platforms. Before Elon bought it, Twitter as a company only cared about making money. Now Elon uses the platform not to make money (because it's not even profitable), but to gain influence and political power. He uses his other businesses to subsidize Twitter and keep it afloat. That's the issue. This wouldn't be happening if Twitter was owned by thousands of shareholders, without a single individual owning a large share, as it was before.

So here is an idea: Make it illegal for a single individual to own more than 1% of the shares of any social media company with more than 1 million users.

If you think this is unfeasible, it's not. Comcast's CEO owns only 1% of the company. And in fact, Twitter was the same way before Elon bought it. Many companies operate like this.

Of course we would need to close loopholes. We also couldn't allow a single individual to own a non-related company that, in turn, owns more than 1% of a social media company. That would just be an indirect ownership. Or a family holding from doing the same thing.

And for those who are wondering, the law could define "social media" as "any digital service whose content is majorly provided by users of the service".

This regulation would not run into any issues with free speech laws (they could still try it in court, but it would be hard for them to win), since it doesn't address speech, and it doesn't even target the company. It targets the individual. And the government has authority to make ownership of certain things illegal.

This could also be done in other countries aside from the US. They could just make it illegal for such companies to operate in their country.

So there you have it. By preventing the concentration of power in the hands of a few individuals, we prevent the abuse of that power in our democracies.