https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/12/302337754...

"Google Maps Displays Crimean Border Differently In Russia, U.S."

It's like what Google did in China. They did not want to agree to the censorship terms imposed by the Chinese government so they stopped operating there. (It looks like they are reversing course on this now and may release a censored version soon, but that is neither here nor there)

The Polish government cannot make Twitter do something it does not want to and still permit it to operate in the country. They will have to ban it outright if Twitter does not agree to their terms.

What Twitter wants is irrelevant if it's not within what the local government wants. There's nothing absurd about that.

You, I and many others actually cannot do whatever we want, even on our own property.

It is true that the software world isn't used to the same level of regulation as manufacturing or agriculture, so the idea of application of, say, antitrust laws to digital giants seems unusual to software people.

You see now how absurd that argument is?

No one has been banned from Twitter for being black, or jewish.

You see now how absurd that argument is?

If you go into a restaurant and start screaming at people that the election was rigged, or waving a nazi flag, or telling everyone they should storm the kitchen to demand gluten free pasta, they will kick you the fuck out.

And what makes it so? The law, I presume?

If so, then "censoring a user" is equally a crime, because this Polish law says so.

There was no state law against racial discrimination and the bar only used local products so didn’t engage in interstate commerce.

You see, unless we specifically make laws to protect a class of people, private companies will discriminate on that basis.

I guess the question here is do we want to make “people who lie and spread disinformation about important matters” into a protected class. As if is now, we barely discriminate against them. You have to lie for 4 solid months, culminating in a violent riot against the central government before any private entity will ban you.

Nobody is saying anybody should be banned/blocked for who they are - just for what they say.

e.g. Similar to the "gay cake" case (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-45789759). Issue isn't that the customer was gay, the issue was the bakers didn't want to make this particular cake for anybody.

Having been born a black or a jew (at least for the genetics) is not.

Edit: more generally, this is something you are vs something you did. The latter is widely considered as acceptable criterion for revoking your privileges or rights.

Discriminating people for what they are (deadly skin emissions aside; I challenge you to come up with a real-world example) doesn't feel fair, neither to those who are being discriminated against nor the population in general. Unfair constructs in the society are likely to cause overall harm in the long term (if nothing else, the society is unlikely to extract the full potential of those who feel unjustly treated by it). So you'd have to have some benefits that are greater (or greater harm avoided) than the likely harm to justify causing that harm.

So voluntaryness is not irrelevant, with a footnote that there might exist a case where it needs to be weighted against other factors.

The argument is not absurd, it only has its limitations and is not absolute. You have shown one of the limitations: Discrimination based on identity is one of them.

Unless of course... you aren't really a social platform, and what you really want to be is a fascism platform. Parler pretending to be social media is transparent as glass. There's a fabricated narrative that "right wing ideas" are being censored which is simply untrue. Twitter does not care if you post that you think healthcare should be private. But Twitter obviously does care when people start spreading objectively false information with the express aim of inciting violence.

Once a company can affect X million+ people they become a direct manipulator of societal/democratic opinion.

If they put themselves in a position of publishers, then they should fall under specific laws accordingly.

Can they do that without leaving the EU?

So far, they've mostly been messing around with environmental rulings, etc. not so much fundamental freedoms.

Poland has (wisely) decided social media is like telephones and you can’t stop providing service because of what customers say, as long as it is legal. Good for them.

Poland is a sovereign country — Twitter doesn’t get to tell them how to act. That’s “tail wags dog”.

Social media companies blatantly exerted themselves as political entities — and now they’re facing “common carrier” regulation from existing political entities who don’t like that.

Again, if Twitter is uncomfortable being a common carrier for Polish social media — they’re free to exit the market and offer their services elsewhere.

The only reason you trust private media companies is because they are supposed to be as neutral as possible, not political. If not neutral, then perhaps society should start treating them for what they really are - private political machines.

Furthermore censorship is stupid. You might like it when it's Trump getting censored, but you wont be laughing once the censorship comes back and hits you. Free speech fuck yes.

I am european and I have the exact opposite view:

Public entities are supposed to be neutral, private ones are not.

I disagree. :)

I think the difference is that unlike spoiled American "Bernie Sanders voter"-generation, Polish people still remember what it's like to live under a far-left censorship and simply do not want to experience that again.