A few times over the years, I’ve taught seminars about social media. Facebook, I’d explain, is like a planned community. People view it as a safe neighborhood. Your page is your house, and your friend’s page is his house. There are other neighborhoods, such as Twitter and YouTube. Then there’s the information superhighway, Google. It’s important to know that it’s all connected. There may be dark alleys that are difficult to find, but they can be found. The internet is forever.

Imagine that the online neighborhood is a real neighborhood. Imagine living in a planned community with a corporate owner who built the infrastructure and then sold out parts of the property for individual homes and for businesses. The corporation would make money from fees and taxes on things bought and sold in the district. The corporation would be very rich. It would receive, after all, a piece of every pie in the community.

Now imagine the corporation making decrees about who could and could not live in the homes. Perhaps they didn’t like a person’s color, religion, or politics. Imagine the corporation deciding that a business in a strip mall sells a product it does not want the company to sell after it has made thousands of dollars in taxation and fees on that business.

Further, imagine being kicked out of one’s home or business overnight and losing everything in a blink. There’s no Homeowners Association. There’s no government police force. Friends of the corporate owners live and work as free as they like. Those who disagree with the corporation’s policies are banned from the community. They lose their business. The value of everything they own is gone overnight.

As it stands now, there are laws against discrimination for mortgage lenders, renters, building owners, and corporations. People can’t be booted from their homes or have their businesses destroyed simply because a functionary within the corporation decides that he or she hates those kind.

Not so online. A person can build a social media home and persona, he can build his business, and with a keystroke, the corporation can destroy him. Overnight, the value he built in his business on Facebook or YouTube, for example, evaporates. The tech companies can do so for no reason other than that they feel like it. Community rules written by the corporation and enforced by new college graduates fueled by commie idealism and social-justice vengeance are capricious and inconsistently applied.

The home or business owner has no recourse. He might sue said company, but in the 20 years it might take to win the case, his livelihood is lost. He is canceled.