What scares me to no end is foreign interference by intelligence agencies in domestic affairs done via social media. That is the real danger here. We are seeing the destabilizing effects of that since 2015.

I also just don't see the widespread censorship of conservative opinions that you do. JK Rowling is still there with her TERF views (which I actually largely agree with). Jordan Peterson is still there denying the predominant view on human-caused climate change. r/conservative; nobody wants to censor this or anything like it. Bret Weinstein is still there spreading his Covid vaccine misinformation. Donald Trump got kicked off after repeated ToS violations. Far-leftists also get kicked off (I know they recently shut down a bunch of far-left subreddits) and you don't see that because of your echo chamber.

When someone says that _Twitter_ does heavy handed exercising of censorship or algorithmic manipulation just shows me that most people don't actually use Twitter and instead consume it view headlines. That wouldn't be surprising considering is the 15th largest social network by MAU globally. The Twitter product today is still largely the same as it was 10 years ago; Meta & friends do far more to stifle "free speech" but are never given the same sort of criticism because they do the "right" kind of amplification and moderating. Twitter is probably the least moderated of all the big social networks but it gets the most criticism for having too much moderation. What people actually want from Twitter is freedom from criticism from the mob, i.e "free speech for me, but not for thee".

>But, anyone who starts a new platform (let's assume similar to r/conservative which is absolutely not neo-nazi or fascist), gets intense pushback from the existing incumbents not with market forces,

Not with market forces? You mean to say that censorship is what is actually holding Gab back from mainstream adoption? This sentiment has always been incredibly myopic. I don't know why American conservatives are always surprised when their flavor of politics aren't popular. For some reason Europe and the rest of the West, who are farther left than Americans, cease to exist and the reasons why sites like Gab aren't huge is because of censorship.

There seems like there's a presumption that already successful companies are not subject to the same forces as other companies, despite all the evidence (including Twitter's experience) to the contrary.