Actually, it’s the opposite. Liberty is for individual freedom, not institutional freedom.

I would back a small business’s right to do this. Somewhere between there and twitter scale, the decision changes.

So you’d impose the small business or political groups rights to advertise on twitter (a larger corporation)? Where’s the balance there?

This argument is so boring, it's the same every time.

"They can build their own Twitter!"

We have monopoly laws, they are not fundamentally at odds with liberty, they recognize that it's undesirable for society to have monopolies exercising market power. These need to be updated to reflect the current platform monopolies. Just like the phone company can't tell you what you can talk about on the phone, or railroads have to share their tracks under some conditions. Applying the same thing to Twitter and other bug tech platforms is a logical extension. The only difference is it would also involve the government/establishment giving up power

Nah. I don’t buy it. Don’t like Twitter? You have a few options:

1. Create a competitor. Network effects here are tough. Inertia is a thing. But perhaps those Twitter users with your sentiments will follow you to your new platform. See ya!

2. Buy up enough shares to put yourself on the board. This is akin to “write your congress person”. Amounts to little.

3. Buy Twitter. Only folks crazy enough (see also Elon Musk) can do this. I say crazy because Twitter doesn’t make decent money and is fine without him in my opinion. But ownership is a sure fire way to change things.

Other options you could also pursue are:

4. Wax poetic on the internet about how since they’re the only game in town they need to be open to taking money from anyone and everyone. They also need to allow all forms of speech. This also amounts to nothing.

I guess a future Trump or DeSantis or Carlson or other Q affiliated presidency could along with a majority in congress force Twitter to do the things you’re advocating for. I sure hope not.

So yeah, if you build it they will come. So go build a competitor or join the myriad of others that operate in the extreme free speech/anything goes mantra. The rest of us will keep using Twitter and enjoying the relatively benign place it’s become since Trump was banned.

The outrage at one large corporation (Twitter) acting one way while implicitly defending other large corporations, e.g., Exxon-Mobil’s propaganda-spreading— seems a weird tightrope to walk. Not sure how large a problem small-business-climate-disinformation-spreading is.

Twitter is not outraged for spreading a specific opinion but for muting the opposite side.

> If you're interested in liberty here, you should be backing twitter's right to do this.

Indeed, so long as it isn't the government enforcing it on everyone, then the free market will come up with a competitor that will arguably start attracting those most aware of the importance of and aligned with freedom, freedom of speech - those people who arguably are on average much more highly competent and earning a higher income to be able to financially support a better model, and likewise bring their network(s) with them; I am working on launching such a competitor and believe I'm designing a platform model and launch/growth strategy that will work very well.

No one’s saying Twitter doesn’t have the right to do this. They’re saying it’s a bad policy and Twitter should choose to allow content it disagrees with. Silencing others is not Liberty.

Except it’s well within their rights to do this. They’re not beholden to be the platform that furthers false things like climate change denial

That's a very difficult thing to moderate, to manage, and from personal experience Twitter doesn't even enforce their existing rules accurately.

For example, will posts denying the hysteria of climate change - let's say the ideology of climate change activism that has formed, perhaps fuelled by for-profit industrial complexes, perhaps also leveraged by some governments wanting to use fear to manufacture consent toward control - be ban on Twitter, will that be considered denial if they point out things like some parts of the world actually cooling - and "heat deaths" in those areas are actually going down? Climate change hysteria media seems to only want to report the increasing heat deaths annually, but not deducting the reduced deaths from the cooling areas.

Now I don't even know for 100% if the above is true, or how true it is, as I haven't had a chance to dive into some of the leaders of that effort who're supposedly trying to have a grounded, balanced conversation on climate - referencing data, etc.

An organization or individual claiming they can be or are an arbiter of truth is a recipe for disaster; what New Zealand Prime Minister once actually said comes to mind, that if you hear something not from government (about COVID, the pandemic) then it's not true.

>> No one’s saying Twitter doesn’t have the right to do this.

> Except it’s well within their rights to do this.

Swing and a miss.