alt Hacker NewsHacker News doesn't use a strictly chronological feed. Hacker News manipulates the feed to promote certain items over others. Hacker News moderates legal content. Those are all features of social media algorithms that people are opposed to. It just isn't "objectionable" when HN does it.
And regulations of this kind always creep out of scope. We've seen it happen countless times. But people hate social media so much around here that they simply don't think it through, or else don't care.
You're moving the goalposts.
You said:
> Most people on HN who advocate regulating social media...want to make all algorithmic feeds other than strictly chronological illegal
I don't buy that, at all. I think they want a chronological feed to follow, and they want the end of targeted outrage machines that are poisoning civil discourse and breeding the type of destructive politics that has led to our sitting U.S. president to call for critics to be hanged.
Comparing what Facebook has done to the U.S. with HN's algorithm is slippery slope fallacy to an extreme, and even if HN's front page algorithm against all odds was outlawed due to a political overreaction to the destruction Facebook has wrought, I'd call it a fair trade.