The recent events in Rose Bay – of all places – have shredded the last of my residual anarchism.

Such is the ferocity of the stoush between two rival Rose Bay community Facebook groups that the impact of their wild internet barney has not been limited to a court battle, lawyers’ fees and a lot of damaged human feelings. It’s consigned my University of Wollongong Anarchist Collective T-shirt to the dustbin of history, along with my personal belief in the capacity of organic, extrapolitical entities to govern themselves democratically.

Bianca Havas started the Rose Bay Community – Official Group page seven years ago with a friend, while their children were attending Rose Bay public school. Their project was a casual noticeboard for community events, and built a participating audience of more than 5,000.

There was a no-tolerance policy towards abuse, but as a full-time worker and parent, Havas couldn’t maintain real-time moderation. Meanwhile, local voiceover artist Bruce Goldberg was drawing ire from within the group for posts that – according to the Australian – ranged from criticising “poor spelling to direct attacks on local business owners”.

Goldberg had started his own Rose Bay community page on Facebook and responded to his critics on Havas’ page with a Facebook Live video of himself warning “trolls and bullies” they were “playing with fire”. Comments made there, say his lawyers, cast Goldberg as a “danger to the women of Rose Bay” and as someone who “enjoys bullying women”. So Goldberg began defamation proceedings against Alice Voigt for those comments in March.

Voigt has been fundraising on GoFundMe to pay impending legal bills; the case is being heard in February.

Numerous publications have run stories on the events because what’s happened in Rose Bay has implications far beyond this harbourside Battle Royale or my student T-shirt collection. In June, the New South Wales supreme court judge Stephen Rothman found that entities representing themselves though Facebook pages could legally be regarded as publishers. His remarks were made in a pretrial hearing for Dylan Voller, a former detainee of Don Dale. In the wake of the Don Dale revelations, Voller is suing media publications whose Facebook pages hosted comments that he alleges have impugned his reputation. Publishers, Rothman affirmed, “had a responsibility to ensure defamatory remarks were not posted in the first place.”

This “Voller precedent” established, Havas was hit with a separate defamation suit from Goldberg in August, spending $9,000 on personal legal fees before reaching a settlement. The terms were mostly confidential, but her Facebook page has closed. She’s agreed not to start any other “Rose Bay-related” group.

There’s much consternation among media entities that the mastheads whose business model has been cannibalised by Facebook are being made to wear the consequences of behaviour Facebook itself facilitates. Media academics aren’t the only ones criticising Facebook for claiming “we’re not a publisher, we’re a common carrier”. It is, indeed, a fiction. News recently broke that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been enjoying cosy meals with Donald Trump, and the New York Times reported again the company’s refusal to fact-check ads from politicians that it hosts; abrogating responsibility, spaketh Facebook, is a “free speech” issue. For both the Australian attorney general and his shadow, it’s instead an issue of shared concern – Facebook “should be held to the same liability as newspapers for what is posted on their platforms”; legal reform is mooted. An extraordinary speech from comedian Sacha Baron Cohen to the Anti-Defamation League has also called out the culpability of the platforms in the online spread of hate. “Instead of letting the Silicon Six decide the fate of the world,” he implored, “let our elected representatives, voted for by the people, of every democracy in the world, have at least some say.”

It’s from instinctive agreement with his point that I find my old ideological deference shifting.

The “rational core” of anarchism within the political movement of the left was ever to contest replicating old hierarchies with the pursuit of state power. Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin advocated – romantically – organic solidarity within direct action. Long before Facebook, he trolled his friend and antagonist Marx as “authoritarian from head to heels”; Marx argued for democratising government.

In the wake of the second world war, the west embraced big, enfranchising democratic projects of the state to heal the social damage war created, yet since the 1970s the mantra of “small government” from neoliberal regimes has defunded, privatised or shrunk social infrastructure – centres, libraries, public utilities, common places – even as it’s squeezed working households into increasing hours of labour. Is not the overwhelming attraction of Facebook arguably a human instinct to regain, at least virtually, an infrastructure for community that’s physically retreating from us?

The accessible, stateless, infinite digital frontier was once hailed as a democratising space, but as the internet has evolved so too is the realisation that its anarchy is not without hierarchy. Internal competitions for control among self-appointed leaderships are brutal. On Facebook, even Rose Bay becomes the wild west.

A democratic state has the obligation of making media platforms themselves accountable to democracy, lest the expressions of that media inherently propagandise for democracy’s demise. Yes, the Voller precedent imposes limited accountability, but it’s hard not to look at Rose Bay and consider that the law has applied a Band-Aid to the wrong end of the horse.

Rose Bay locals “begged” Goldberg to desist his legal action; he warned he had resources and the money “to put a big fireball down” upon his critics.

He did. He has. The result suggests Facebook can supply the painful answer to the old question Marxists asked of the anarchists: if authority is not under democratic control, then who – or what – is in control?

• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist