Yes, of course - but - it is becoming so.

Twitter and Facebook are starting to approach the threshold of 'public good' wherein at least, there would need to be rules or regulations.

If TW and FB did not actually regulate their content - we would see this exposed much more quickly. Foreign/Russian interference in elections would immediately force Congress to act, there's just too much power.

Aside from the ambiguities of 'how and what to police' we do have the added complexity of the nature of 'large, ostensibly public platforms' managed by private companies.

The argument is that it's getting there. It's the leading platform for public debate in the US right now. Journalists spend their days refreshing their Twitter feed, so the effect isn't just in the size of Twitter's platform but its influence.

Twitter is a plague on public discourse. We'd be better off as a society if it were never invented. If I knew how to put the genie back in the bottle, I would advocate for it.

It’s absolutely not. I don’t follow anything political, neither Obama nor Trump. Among 1200+ people I follow are all from AI/ML/biotech/space research. Most of them are academics. I throughly enjoy my feed and it’s my go to place to stay up to date as well as some fun nerdy conversations. Tweeter is a hammer, use wisely.

I didn't say it ruined your discourse in your niche. I'm not saying Twitter can't be good to any people.

I'm saying that as a tool for public discussion, it is vile.

it's easy enough - make it a paid-for service and regulate - read ban - free versions.

not going to happen because apparently people paying with their attention instead of dollars in manipulative ways is just fine. the argument goes that they can always not read it, but that's a false dichotomy in social networks and why i'd like to see twitter, google and facebook get labeled as utilities.

I'd love to see ISPs become utilities, which would be the first step.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, this represents my personal opinion, not that of my employer, etc.

Google, the search engine, I could see being a utility. The rest is iffy. Now, how you disentangle that from the rest of the business... I can either see it being impossible or essentially already done (depends whether you think their existing ads system is biased in some way that regulations/utilit-ification would change - I'm not in ads, I wouldn't know).

Twitter and Facebook as utilities... I mean, I'm not sure I buy it. What kind of utility is it? A utility is something I imagine to be somewhat required by society. A search engine is kind of required in modern society. Facebook and Twitter are incredibly easy to do without.

POTUS is on Twitter. If you want access to his tweets, you absolutely must use Twitter.

Maybe it's a policy problem of the US in particular and politicians in general instead of Twitter/Facebook being an utility. As is, status quo is for me that they're utilities for that single reason.

This POTUS is a huge abnormality that I hope can be forgotten to the annals of time and a jail cell. I would hope not to use him as an example of anything that represents normalcy, like accessibility of his tweets.

abnormality or no, unfortunately that's status quo that we're dealing with here. situation changes, we can rethink going back to status quo ante.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall when a legal team responsible for supporting this narrative has to tackle the issue of regulating the platforms as a public utility, but not the Internet providers that carry them.

There have been people making these arguments both for and against for a very long time. Even as an example, on this very site:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I think you'll quickly lean in the opposing view after reviewing those viewpoints, because if Twitter was a utility it would have been declared one at some point in the previous 11 years.

how long did it take to break up standard oil? ma bell?

What would it even mean to break up twitter? How would that work?

i'm just pointing out 11 years is a very short time for regulators to do anything.

My point is that websites are fundamentally different from resources you extract from the environment and the eagerness by some to treat them as such is specious.