ACLU Counsel Warns of 'Unchecked Power' of Twitter, Facebook

Re:ACLU Counsel Warns of 'Unchecked Power' of Twitter, Facebook by DenisM on Saturday January 09, 2021 @07:24PM (#25706739)

So you keep saying, but I have to wonder what’s the total reach? If 20% are reading, are they then immediately retelling each to 2 more people? And what if every single news caster, PR agent, and manager is among the 20%?

Also, how much is too much? Is 51% the red line?

I think most fruitful approach is to borrow from the antitrust law - a business should be large enough to distort the entire market. Not quite certain how to apply the metric in this case, but that’s the idea.

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Re:ACLU Counsel Warns of 'Unchecked Power' of Twitter, Facebook by SpicyLemonZest on Saturday January 09, 2021 @10:38PM (#25709363)

I think that's a reasonable argument - it's just very different from the idea that someone literally cannot communicate their message if they're not allowed to do it on Twitter.

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Re:ACLU Counsel Warns of 'Unchecked Power' of Twitter, Facebook by DenisM on Sunday January 10, 2021 @11:48AM (#25716524)

Would you agree that the market place of ideas is crippled by the presence of a “monopoly”?

Not destroyed as a government could do, but crippled.

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Re:ACLU Counsel Warns of 'Unchecked Power' of Twitter, Facebook by SpicyLemonZest on Sunday January 10, 2021 @11:11PM (#25724379)

I don't think it is. There was a time in the 90s when AOL was in a similarly dominant position with much stricter moderation policies, but the marketplace of ideas never felt crippled. Everyone just understood that the AOL sandbox was a sanitized common ground, and if you wanted frank discussions on complex or controversial topics you needed to go elsewhere. (And I don't know of any topic, no matter how controversial or offensive, that doesn't have some active forum where it's regularly discussed.)

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