Edit: Read the rest of this user's (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=monsecchris) other content. It's worse than I thought. Shilling for conservatives on HN is a bad look.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
"[...] antitrust laws have had the same basic objective: to protect the process of competition for the benefit of consumers, making sure there are strong incentives for businesses to operate efficiently, keep prices down, and keep quality up."
A monopoly that abuses its power is one example of anti-trust; it is not the definition.
No it is not. Twitter does not have a monopoly on social media.
> It seems blatantly anticompetitive but I’m curious what specific law they seem to be breaking (so I can add it to my anti-Twitter complaining heap).
None. They have done it in the past [0] and no-one complained apart from techies here getting emotional about it.
"You and your ilk can post your filth on a dozen other websites, Twitter is not a monopoly."
"Twitter isn't censoring you, they just don't want to listen to your bullshit, and they're showing you the door (relevant xkcd posted everywhere: https://xkcd.com/1357/)"
Some of us warned that if the tables turned, so would their tune. "Twitter is much like the public square, and banning dissenting voices shouldn't be celebrated" we warned. Just a few years later, here we are. I feel vindicated.
Now it turns out that Musk doesn't really care about free speech. He just wants to control what the content of the speech is. This is an example that affirms the suspicions of the left: that the right's proclamations about speech are disingenuous.
As I understand it, this is why people are calling him out.
Leftists are mad because they no longer have the monopoly of hate on Twitter. As the saying goes, equality feels like oppression when all you've known is privilege.
if he wants to ban mastodon links he's certainly welcome to do so - it's his company. it's just a bad look after positioning himself as a free speech, open market crusader who politically platformed himself as against the very thing he's doing.
"The left" never claimed to be champions for free speech. "They" sought a balance between freedom of speech and public harm. At least that's my take, I can't speak for "them."
Elon Musk calls himself a "free speech absolutist" and that if it's not illegal speech, it shouldn't be banned. Yet the moment he's at the helm, the bans start flowing for all manner of legal speech.
What I'm saying is, words have meaning. If you want to claim a principle you have to make an effort to live by it. People who claim principles and proceed to ignore them or even act contrary to them are not principled people, they're just making noise. We should not listen to them, or take what they say seriously. For unprincipled people are fairweather friends, and likely have ulterior motives.
More to the point, outside of antitrust there are plenty of people that have specified in the past that Twitter is a private company and can do what it wants, but that its moderation decisions are subject to private scrutiny and that consumers can complain about them. And importantly, that doesn't mean that all of its moderation decisions are universally good or bad.
"People are allowed to complain about private moderation decisions" != "All moderation decisions are exactly the same and if you complain about any of them you have to complain about all of them"
It's OK to point out that reporting about someone else posting flightplan data is different from subtly encouraging people to bomb hospitals. The point of Twitter being a private company is that it's not the government and it doesn't have to be blind to those distinctions. Private speech/moderation is the place in free speech debates where we are allowed to make actual value judgements that are more nuanced than "all censorship good/bad".
It's also completely valid for people to point out that Musk hasn't banned doxing, he's banned an extremely narrow category of doxing that is specifically designed to get rid of the one account he doesn't like, while still allowing accounts like Libsoftiktok to stick around. It's completely valid to point out that Musk announced this policy at the same time that he posted a public license plate on Twitter and asked his followers if any of them recognized it. It's valid to look at that behavior and think, "huh, maybe this has never actually been about free speech for him."
But yeah, it's not illegal for Musk to ban journalists. It's a bad business move and it's going to prompt more people to jump ship off of Twitter and it's going to prompt more publishers to think about how they disseminate content and how much they should use Twitter as part of that strategy, but it's not illegal. Anticompetitive behavior might be different (although no lawmakers cared when Facebook did it, so I'm not sure any of them are going to care now).
It's Elon's hypocrisy. He made tons of noise about being a free-speech absolutist, but is now banning people that disagree with him.
Anybody on the right should be just as angry, but they're not because the hypocrisy benefits them.
But on top of all that, there's the feeling he ruined a place a lot of people liked. It's like if your favourite local restaurant got replaced by a McDonald's. It's not illegal, it might even find a new clientele, but now my friends and I need to find a new spot so we're a little grumpy about it.
My office is pretty democrat and most people don't understand the twitter hysteria. It's clear now Twitter has a lot of radical left. These radical left doesn't realize most people are on Elon's side after his kid was stalked.