Yesterday a group of US politicians who cannot control guns threatened to regulate Facebook.

During his testimony, representatives showed Mark Zuckerberg a picture of one of the fake news items that had been circulated on Facebook during the election, and asked him what he was going to do to stop this kind of material being circulated. Now, I may be a little wet behind the ears but I had always been led to believe that America valued free speech – that the country even had some kind of thing in its constitution protecting free speech – but apparently this idea goes out of the window where Facebook is concerned.

Organizations that have not yet been held accountable in the way Facebook was yesterday include Twitter, Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, or the New York Times. And somehow the leaders of Cambridge Analytica have also escaped harsh questioning by these sudden defenders of democracy. Why only Facebook? Presumably if Rupert Murdoch took the stand he could be shown a picture of some of the bullshit his channel broadcasts daily, and asked what he was going to do to stop it. Alex Jones, obviously, constantly broadcasts bullshit and yet hasn’t been told to stop it or face regulation. So why Facebook?

Facebook is at its heart a form of content provider that enables ordinary citizens to present their opinions to all their friends and associates at once, without anyone outside those groups being able to see or know. Twitter, Fox News, the Young Turks, all these organizations are publicly viewable, so that if they say something bad about someone or broadcast lies everyone sees it. But with Facebook, only your friends and the people you choose to address get to see it. Sure Mark Zuckerberg and his evil wizards see it but they don’t care. One important group of people who do not get to see it are our political representatives and leaders. They don’t know what’s going on out there in the wilds of Facebook, they can’t monitor it. Sure, they can pay a company like Cambridge Analytica to use that to their advantage but fundamentally Facebook removes content provision and debate from the grip of organizations like Fox News, CNN, or any organizations connected to any political donors. In the 2016 election it may have helped Republicans (and Russia), but there’s no guarantee that it will always be a powerful tool just for evil. And there’s no guarantee that only Russia will stay out of future elections. What if China decides to weigh in on the Democratic side in the next elections? Facebook is a wild card precisely because it liberates our voices from mass media. It also offers another powerful tool that scares governments – the power of spontaneous organization. This power is already being deployed by left wing organizations in America, and it’s not something that politicians will ever be comfortable.

China has a version of Facebook called Wechat, and the Chinese government is terrified of it. They maintain tight controls over it – one could say they regulate it, to use a term that America’s representatives understand – to ensure it can’t be used for wildcat demonstrations, to spread dissent, or to provide information the government doesn’t control. Of course the Chinese government got in at the development stage and now see it as a useful tool for monitoring public dissent and keeping track of public opinion, but they also keep a careful eye on everything that goes on there, because they don’t want it being used in the way that Facebook could be – to spread information the government can’t see and can’t address.

It’s probably a safe rule for life that if Republicans decide they want to regulate something, they’re not doing it in the best interests of ordinary people. Seeing these politicians rounding on Zuckerberg, you have to think that they aren’t attacking Facebook because they’re concerned about our privacy, but because they realize this tool is out of their control, and they’re scared of its huge potential to break the stranglehold of a few rich donors on the dissemination of information in America. Yes, Facebook needs to tighten up its privacy rules and be more responsible about how it handles data. But the election wasn’t stolen by Facebook alone, and censorship and regulation of Facebook is not the solution to this problem. It’s a rare occasion when a politician wants to censor things out of a genuine sense of social responsibility – they have too much skin in the game. What we saw yesterday was not a group of brave politicians taking on a huge monopoly to protect our privacy. It was a bunch of tyrants who want to shut down our freedom to disseminate information in an uncontrolled and unmonitored way.

Don’t let them!