Two blueprints for social media reform seemingly present a dilemma: either accept platforms as the rules of the public sphere (and use regulation to tame them) or divest platforms of power by disabling platform governance. That is a false choice, one that sounds like the “great difficulty” the Federalists discussed: protecting people requires government, but people also require protection from the government. This Article draws on the way out of the dilemma that constitutionalism builds on: dividing power.

The Article discusses how the recent Supreme Court decision about social media legislation casts doubt not just on the Florida and Texas laws at issue in the case—examples of the platform neutrality project—but also on more sophisticated approaches that follow the model of EU regulation—the platform responsibility project. While platform neutrality is inherently flawed, the Article argues that platform responsibility is a valuable tool, but only if it is followed by attention to the antecedent question of platform power. As a prototype of what attending to platform power could offer us, the Article puts forward platform federalism, a framework where most authority over content is devolved to user communities (similar to states in a federal system) but preserves platforms as a delimited part of the governance to uphold and police platform-wide commitments. The overall goal is to provide an alternative regulatory model so that we can have platform governance without submitting to the authority that the "new governors" have claimed for themselves.