This is a very relevant point for about 2005.

In the years since then, what was once a constellation of internet platforms has shrunken and consolidated to only a handful that are the de facto gatekeepers.

Legally, of course, nothing has changed since then. But it's willfully ignoring the unprecedented power of major platforms in shaping popular dialog to compare them to a local supermarket escorting someone out.

clearly it’s more than that. these companies are more than just private companies they are social utilities. and might be regulated as such in the future. that’s my point.

I think this is an instance of the biggest, most disastrous fallacy of the last half century: that a company is a social utility.

It’s not. It’a a bunch of rich people in California. If you want a public utility for communication and socializing, go help build one. Contribute to Mastodon or the rest of the fediverse. Write to representatives (or become one yourself) and propose legislation to fund a public tool that is actually owned by the people. It could even be part of the fediverse!

But asking Twitter to do any random thing someone wants because they are a big company is insane and is going to cause us nothing but pain.

But these are the services that people actually use. On Mastodon you end up with... well the sort of person who uses Mastodon. Which means that the people that run those services have some degree of de facto influence, which in turn means that they are likely to end up regulated and constrained by other powerful actors.

Today it's rich people in California, once it was rich people building railroads and pumping oil.

how is it crazy to want to apply a regulatory framework to certain industries? we do that for cable companies, ISPs, banks, publishers, food producers, restaurants, etc etc. So why not social media?

The only reason is these companies are “new” and were not viewed as much more than a toy until a few years ago and now we’re seeing the consequences of that.

I don’t think wanting a regulatory framework is bad at all (though I think in the last few decades, we have naïvely tried to regulate companies into doing things that are simply counter to their nature rather than solving problems directly, eg minimum wage vs UBI).

A utility is different than a regulated company.

I see there's a wikipedia entry about social media as public utility (which I take to be what you mean by 'social utilities' in the sense of regulation). To my knowledge, though, this is just a theoretical construct, not a legal one, yet in this thread it's seems to be taken for granted that treating Twitter as a utility is just another tool in the (U.S.) government's toolbox. Is there any reason to think it actually is? Seems offhand like a stretch, but I'm no legal scholar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_public_utili...

You put it more eloquently than I could. It is a private company but it also hosts world leaders as a dispatch service. Something feels off about a single company being able to indiscriminately terminate voices at a whim.

Should the New York Times be allowed to indiscriminately decline publication of OpEds?

Trump has no shortage of places that he can speak his voice and people will hear him. He can call any news station right now. He could make an account on Parler or many other social media sites.

No specific company is obligated to broadcast his messages. The government can't obligate anyone who doesn't want it to run his propaganda.

I do not have any interest in Trump. I trust my American friends will do whatever is best for them and I respect that. This is bigger than that for me. Everyone uses Twitter, news corportations across the divides reference it. If it is being edited from the top, that seems scary is all. In 10 years, maybe no one will remember Trump, but maybe the person who is right for your vote will not have a voice to reference.

Twitter edits their site from the top all the time. It would look like your spam folder if they didn't. They remove spam, harassment, calls to violence, etc. It would not be popular if they didn't do any of this.

> these companies are more than just private companies they are social utilities.

No, no they're not. If you or others personally perceive them as utilities, you have skewed perception of reality. I mean not even the ISP you're using to access them aren't considered utilities. It's funny that the same people who applauded Pai for the net neutrality thing are the ones complaining about 'big tech censorship'.

I’ve been sitewide banned from Reddit twice. It’s always been this way.

you aren't the president. Any future elected official now has to consider if these social media companies are a good medium to communicate with the people. If that elected official doesn't play big tech's rules, the looming threat of a ban might change their mind.

It's crazy naive to not see the implications of this

The President has access to TV (this one mainly uses it to go on long winded rambling call-ins to Fox and Friends), not to mention a fairly comprehensive web platform of his own to communicate.

This is a President who wouldn't even use the designated @potus account because he is so narcissistic he wanted the follower count for himself.

What good reason is there for the president to not simply communicate via whitehouse.gov or equivalent?

You might argue that it has lesser reach compared to a major social media site, but there are countless individuals and organizations that would jump to be the first one posting a link to a presidential address on social media sites.

The president has to follow the TOS just like any other user. They aren’t a king.

the implications being??? that it's not a great idea for the POTUS (or equivalent) to consider a private communications platform as their official "channel to the people"? well, duh! who'd have thunk?

Twitter and the like were never a good medium to communicate with the people. Seldom can you say anything serious in 140 characters.

It's almost as if there are official channels to communicate information. Ones that aren't private companies.

I get banned all the time from reddit. So much so that I have like 10 alt accounts premade so I can just slowly shift from one to the next. Sometimes I don't even know why I get banned.

That statement is incoherent.

If you say things big tech doesn’t like, you get deplatformed. This applies to everyone.

If you got banned the first time you couldn't get banned a second time.

Which is more than just semantics. Suspending an account and the associated momentum without actually banning the person might be a good mechanism to have in place.

You're not the president of the United States.

If anything, the president should be held to a higher standard.

There really shouldn’t be any distinction. The President, while a very powerful figure, is still a citizen. If we’re going to complain about rich people having privileges that poorer people don’t, then Trump is no different in that respect.

Regardless, if Trump wants to, he has official means (through whitehouse.gov) to issue statements. He choose Twitter when he had other options.

No. Right now, they are in fact just private companies. They are not de jure social utilities, even if they act as if they are de facto.

Now, maybe they should be, and should be regulated as such. Maybe we should have a conversation about delegating services which are key to our social fabric to what are just private companies. But that's somewhat orthogonal to the issue at hand.

Additionally, should be noted: if the government attempted to coerce or strong-arm Twitter to keep Donald Trump's account online, that would absolutely be a textbook 1st Amendment violation.

Corporations are legal persons, and have constitutional rights under the 14th Amendment. Coerced speech is not free speech.

I didn’t say that they were social utilities right now, I’m saying this could very well spark interest in regulating social media as more than just any old private business with zero regulatory framework attached to them.

> ...these companies are more than just private companies they are social utilities.

They are not though. They are just private companies. We can argue until the cows come home about how people see them, how they use them, how they feel about them... but at the end of the day they are just private companies.

I agree that we should consider whether that should remain the case. But right now... it is the case.

Most people acknowledge that social media has an unprecedented ability to sway elections. Wouldn't it follow that allowing them to deplatform politicians is a seriously concerting form of censorship, private business or no?

I see this comment a lot.

What does suppression of free speech in America look like to you then?

To follow up, if I would have to imagine it for a book, this is how I would write it — why I think there needs to be better regulation/rights here.

How long until it happens to a marginalized population at scale?

Generally curious your thoughts otherwise. Thanks and be well

Pretty sure that is exactly what will change.

So we need the gov to create a public twitter? It is not very hard or expensive, and twitter will loose market

that it gives ammo to section 230 reform

How about private business (Apple) disallowing people to use an app (parler) on their property (iPhone)?

It's within their right and probably a terrible corner we have painted ourselves into. But you can't even get people to use firefox. So what to do?

Maybe Parler users can take a page from BLM's book and have some peaceful protests in front of Apple Stores all over the country.

Since Parler was a nexus of these terrorists attacks, are you suggesting the same for apple? What are you suggesting? I'm so sick of these vague right wing threats.

Well, protest is the language of the unheard [1]. Or you are suggesting that Floyd protests were terrorist attacks and organized via Parler?

[1]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-protest-is-the-language-...

We're two days from a hostile coup and you're suggesting protests. I really don't know what to think about your suggestion honestly.

The US are indeed in a coup. However, if you think that occupying the Capitol was the coup, you are in for a rude awakening.

Today, Twitter. Tomorrow, FiOS.

FiOS doesn't have to service you

Let's check the terms they agreed to when we, the people, gave them a monopoly on fiber service running through extremely space-constrained boxes under our streets.

Big tech has gotten away with the monopoly-but-not-abuse-of-monopoly argument for a decade because the platforms were free and available to everyone.

If the second point is not true anymore... it's going to start getting regulated like a utility. Your electric and phone providers can't simply decide to stop serving people it doesn't like, and likely, Twitter won't either.

Electric & phone providers had use of public resources & space, a right-of-way across private land, etc.