Re:Twitter says it will restrict retweeting world leaders wh...
by weberc2 on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @02:46PM
(#21273933)
Yes, 'influence' is a question of degree and there is no neat threshold at which one company's influence is too great. Just like there is no neat threshold at which a company is "too monopolistic", yet we still have processes for adjudicating these cases.
Twitter and its many employees and shareholders can vote and lobby, but if they can turn a knob and unilaterally influence elections, clearly they are on the wrong side of that threshold.
The best steelman I can think of is that social media is really analogous to a cable company where each person you're interested in following is a channel. Of course, this falls down for lots of reasons, mostly because Twitter controls which channels you're exposed to and in which proportions--a feature for which there is no real cable analog.
Twitter and its many employees and shareholders can vote and lobby, but if they can turn a knob and unilaterally influence elections, clearly they are on the wrong side of that threshold.
The best steelman I can think of is that social media is really analogous to a cable company where each person you're interested in following is a channel. Of course, this falls down for lots of reasons, mostly because Twitter controls which channels you're exposed to and in which proportions--a feature for which there is no real cable analog.