Unless the government (the people) buys it and funds it through taxes, it doesn't seem to be anywhere near the concept of a public square, just like a newspaper isn't a public square, and the commercial TV and Radio isn't a public square either. Neither are phones. Or billboards.
If something becomes ubiquitous enough to be regarded a public square, we either have to make it one, or fix the reason why a commercial for-profit company is regarded as public square in the first place.
This would be ideal. The network effect is strong. As Barrin92's response to my comment stated, anyone can make an alternative site. But all of the value comes from the large networks of people on these sites.
I would prefer if such a "public square" site weren't for profit, if I'm going to be honest. Not sure how well that would work, but profit motives introduce too many flaws for such a necessary part of society. OTOH, so do influences from other means...
Misrepresentation of the publics interest and voice will continue to occur. There is no solution that I'm aware of.
Works perfectly fine. There are plenty of alt-platforms that are based on self-hosted principles like that (Mastodon, Pleroma, Matrix), and all of them are about the most "free" platforms (rather, protocols) you can find.
Although it was the FCC under Trump that, in 2017, removed common carrier status as a requirement for ISPs. Hard to make the case that ISPs are not common carriers but Twitter is.
I don't understand why many liberals defend a corporations freedom to silence speech but get angry when conservatives in the government do it. Six of one, half dozen of the other, it's still speech being silenced by someone more powerful than you. But one being a corporation and one being a politician doesn't change the fact that both limit freedom of speech protected by the constitution.
Because it’s a false equivalence that has nothing to do with being “liberal”.
The government has the power of coercion. No corporation has that by law.
In general, you are conflating the right to free speech with the privilege of easy armchair dissemination of one’s speech. Simply, your right to say anything doesn’t extend to forcing the world to disseminate and listen to what you have to say. Frankly, that extension is very much 1984.
In extremis, Trump has the means to publish a newsletter and nobody is stopping him from doing it.
The answer is: no you don't. Because the government enables these companies to do these things that enroach upon your rights while making people like you believe you still have said rights simply because it's not the government proper doing it. The government and through lobbying can influence and control a lot of what you do without legislation you know.
The issue isn't Donald Trump being silenced, the issue is wannabe tinpot dictators like him trying to coerce private business into doing his bidding. That's the actual free speech issue if there is one. Nobody should be compelled to host anyone else's speech.
Social media sites are not 'de facto public squares' in any way. It's trivial technically to create an alternative site to the incumbents, that's why there's already like half a dozen alternatives spawning around Trump's political ecosystem. It's just that the content on those sites is so godawful within days of them going online that everyone runs for the hills who has a few brain-cells left.
It is so ridiculous to paint people like Trump, literal oligarchs, as victims of private business lol.
That’s without even talking about stuff like being kicked off app stores, AWS, other hosting, or even their domain name.
There's absolutely no right for you or anyone else to have a guaranteed audience, though plenty of politicians try to make it so by using taxpayer money to let you know they stole some money from one taxpayer and gave it to a larger voting bloc friendly to them.
So, yeah, it's a few days of work to build a twitter replacement, but if you want that audience, you have to put in the sweat to build it, not just jump up and down and demand that you have a right to one that someone else built.
You can be on a dozen social networks, or on none, and hitting enter and going somewhere on the internet takes (almost) the same time regardless of where you go,in other words Facebook is trivially replaceable the same way it replaced MySpace, regardless of how large it is. The question is whether Facebook exercises market power, not whether it is large, which is the exact same flawed argument that people use in regards to Google.
What actually has public character is the physical infrastructure of the net, maybe the ISP level, but not digital products, at least none I have seen yet.
You were probably downvoted because I've seen this question posed a thousand times by people who weren't asking in good faith attempts to learn new things.
Honestly, i don't care if big government want to influence their tech sector, issue fines and revoke license, it's the government prerogative. But it is a power you don't want to abuse (I'll personnally give a break to Modhi because i think it is the first time he does something like that, but i'm more into big gov than 99% of HN users i think)
I live in Canada and not the US so I know little about how US laws work, but it does seem that both countries need to work on addressing the power that giant tech corporations have over speech.
Ideally I would like some sort of government sponsored, decentralized platform similar to matrix, but I imagine that both governments are incapable of producing or unwilling to produce anything of the sort...
I'm also very wary of government intervention given how little representation both the US and Canada peoples have, compared to who actually lobbies politicians.
As much as I do not care at all for Donald Trump, I do still want people, whose ideas I do not agree with for the most part, able to speak their mind.