The question is: should it remain so?

Most jurisdictions have, for example, protections for renters. As in "the landlord cannot barge in at 2 a.m. and kick you out, even though the place is legally his/her".

This kind of legislation was motivated by an effort to protect weaker parties against capriciousness of stronger parties, even though the housing market is nowhere near to an oligopoly.

Now, a Star Chamber of Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Visa banning, e.g. a small business owner overnight will destroy his/her business without recourse and prevent it from getting on their feet again. In my opinion, this is even graver problem than a landlord kicking someone out at will.

You could make a decent argument that twitter and the other social giants have more real power than most countries' governments on this planet. The whole reason we think governments shouldn't censer speech is specifically because they are so powerful, and while you may like who's in power today, good luck trying to keep it that way.

Which is exactly the reason why Twitter should be allowed to set it's own moderation rules. Who else is going to tell Twitter what they can and cannot moderate? The only other people who can is the government and then you have a situation where the government is now controlling speech.

The ironic thing about this situation is that Twitter exercising their own judgement on what can and cannot be hosted on their platform is actually a good thing for the demonstration of independence of social platforms from government control.

That they're only doing it now that trump is leaving office maybe suggests the opposite - that government does have a lot of control

True. And if you remember all those hearings where they pretty much forced those Twitter/FB/Amazon/Google CEOs where they berated them like little kids. Those CEOs didn't really object much and knew they could get in a lot of trouble if they did so. Unfortunately, Trump could hurt those companies if he wanted I'm sure. Just look at what happened to Huawei, now the writing is on the wall for DJI and some others. I'm sure those CEOs were just biding their time waiting for Trump to go (and now they decided to act where it is obvious that he's done).

My interpretation is that isn't that they were fearful of government control but rather welcomed the controversy to their platform as it resulted in more eyeballs on their inlined advertisements.

Trump's departure from office plus the riot was where the balance was tipped (ie Twitter's potential future income from Trump's controversies was no longer greater than the reputational cost in keeping him on the platform).

The argument boils down to: if freedom of speech is the freedom to speak in the town square, could we ever have a situation where social media is the Town Squre of today?

I think not. I just don't think we'll ever have functioning legal frameworks for that.

Basically: freedom of speech and expression will only apply to what you do with your mouth, in the street. "Speech at scale", such as social media, will simply not be able to be included in it.

That might seem like a pessimistic take, but I don't think it is. The alternative is democratically elected governments taking a greater role in social media, effectively claiming services to be part of the substrate of society (Twitter, Streets...). I don't like that idea either. The lesser evil seems like the first scenario: freedom of speech not including at scale.

They are in their rights to delete whatever they want. Making an accusation of illegal conduct and deleting the evidence goes beyond that, though.

> deleting the evidence

What, you don't think they have copies along with an enormous number of other people?

The millions of people reading the accusations in the newspapers can not easily check the accusations. That is the issue.

Yes, copies of his tweets exist, although I am also not sure if they are legal. Iirc Twitter demands that downloaded Tweets are being deleted when they are being deleted on Twitter. Trump himself may have the rights to publish them, though.

Someone that thinks a newspaper is making up a tweet can handle the couple minutes of effort to find it somewhere else.

It's no more effort than looking up something in a speech or a press conference.

But the one tweet is not the issue, they say. It is the one tweet in the context of all his tweets. I mean the one tweet only said "I won't attend the inauguration".

They don't explicitly say what tweets are the actual reason for his termination.

I found an archive of Trump tweets. It consists of 50000 tweets. Finding tweets in there that somehow confirm the claims that he was calling for violence is more work than just a couple of minutes.

> But the one tweet is not the issue, they say. It is the one tweet in the context of all his tweets.

And getting all of them is as easy as getting a speech recording, if not easier.

> I found an archive of Trump tweets. It consists of 50000 tweets. Finding tweets in there that somehow confirm the claims that he was calling for violence is more work than just a couple of minutes.

The exact same thing happens if his twitter is unbanned and you go there for context. I'm not seeing the issue.