Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

A private company that has a monopoly on speech is no longer a private company, it's essentially an unelected and unaccountable part of the permanent government.

You need to think about entities based on their properties, not the labels that are attached to them. That ought to be obvious to people who program for a living; think of a private company with a speech monopoly as the good old .txt.exe scam.

You're attaching the label "not government" to Google, but in terms of properties it is like the government. YouTube has openly admitted to manipulating video results despite it costing them money to do so. Their monopoly position is so strong that the YouTube leadership rules us like a dictatorship.

I would prefer it if these tech monopolies were simply broken up. But failing that, they need to obey the first amendment or be shut down in the US.

Europe is a different beast, but I think the UK at least should adopt the US first amendment.

No company has a monopoly on speech. Especially not twitter of all places...

Has any group of people in history ever had so much control over public discourse at such a large scale as Facebook, or Twitter?

So what's the criteria for ascertaining that a company, like Twitter, has a monopoly on speech and why does that make it like a government? Unless you are claiming that the US government has a monopoly on speech - meaning that anything the US government does not want said, cannot be said in public which is certainly not true in this case since the head of the US government is threatening to shut down Twitter over something they "said".

I am so tired of this disingenuous line of argumentation. Twitter is not at all like a government, it is a private business that offers a free service which you are under no obligation to use, it has no army or legal authority over your life, stop acting like what gets posted or removed from twitter is anything other than a bullshit triviality.

Facebook and Twitter do not control public discourse.

Sheer size is a form of monopoly and government. If a company can't be tipped out of your position by a scrappy startup like Youtube, arguably Twitter, then the people have to step in to start making decisions about what it gets to do.

They also do in the form of moderation, (secret) algorithms and suggestions based on (undisclosed) advertisers

Then who controls the code that their platforms run on, and how is FB able to conduct emotional manipulation experiments?

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...

Is shaping it by selectively removing it a form of control?

>control: the power to influence or direct people's behavior or the course of events

This is seems to indicate they are stepping into a form of control.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...

Operational control of a website does not equate to control of public discourse. Other things exist on the internet besides social media.

If you don't want to be manipulated by Facebook then don't use it. Yes, Facebook is very popular. Anyway, don't use it.

How does this reconcile with the laws of many euro countries compelling website forums to delete content that they deem objectionable? Most recently France passed such a law[0].

> There are multiple levels of fines. It starts at hundreds of thousand of euros but it can reach up to 4% of the global annual revenue of the company with severe cases.

How can these euro countries claim to be free societies when they restrict the most basic element of personal freedom?

It's not just France. Several of the euro countries have laws like this.

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/14/france-passes-law-forcing-...

Why does it need to reconcile? EU governments are allowed to make stupid or bad policies. That doesn't contradict the basic fact that Twitter is not at all like a government, even when it is forced by actual governments to remove content.

> How does this reconcile with the laws of many euro countries compelling website forums to delete content that they deem objectionable?

There's nothing to reconcile. A social media website is not at all like a government, I don't see what the laws in Europe have to do with that.

Are you suggesting the President is incapable of other forms of communication?

Well, just off the top of my head:

* The PRC government right now

* Pretty much any government behind the iron curtain during the cold war

* The Catholic church over much of its history

...

I mean, come on. Pick any reasonably competent totalitarian regime and you'll find that one of core pillars of the support structure is precisely "control over public discourse".

So maybe in context putting a fact check link under a tweet doesn't sound so bad?

Obviously not, I was asking whether or not algorithmic or otherwise selectively moderated could shape how millions of the public can communicate their ideas. Let alone thought leaders and others the public interacts with to guide societal questions and answers.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals disagrees:

"Despite YouTube's ubiquity and its role as a public-facing platform, it remains a private forum, not a public forum subject to judicial scrutiny under the First Amendment," the court said."

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/youtu...

I'm referring to this statement:

> stop acting like what gets posted or removed from twitter is anything other than a bullshit triviality

Should we not care about something that gets removed from Twitter because the French or German or Chinese government didn't want it there?

I'm referring to this statement:

> stop acting like what gets posted or removed from twitter is anything other than a bullshit triviality

Should we not care about something that gets removed from Twitter because the French or German or Chinese government didn't want it there?

Whether or not you care about Twitter content removal is subjective, but the answer of whether you should care more if Twitter or the government removed the content is pretty clear: you should care more about the government every time. Latching onto "should we care" is kind of pedantic and misses the point.

The most Twitter can do is tell you to find somewhere else to publish your speech. The most the French / German / Chinese government can do is destroy your entire life and the lives of everyone who publishes or consumes your speech.

So when a government leader starts talking about suppressing critical speech, that's a lot more worrisome than Twitter deleting tweets. The abuse of power is hardly comparable. You might even say that in comparison, it's a bullshit triviality.

If they do not control public discourse, why were there allegations that misinformation on those platforms can affect elections? Isn't this new policy of Twitter an admission that they do affect discourse, and thus need to be more responsible?

Rupert Murdoch

I don't think you have understood my point.

When a company has a total monopoly over a sector, you are obliged to use the service they provide or you will simply go without that service entirely.

Twitter is not a clear example of this, because it doesn't really have a solid monopoly. But Google and Facebook certainly are - there really isn't a competitor to YouTube or Google Search, and there isn't a competing social network to Facebook.

Those laws are democratically accountable though, so it's not the same thing as what I am talking about.

The 9th circuit are wrong and I am right.

The US government deliberately limits its speech monopoly via the 1st amendment, but outside that that limitation it does have a speech monopoly enforced by prison sentences.

You can read about exceptions here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_ex...

> So what's the criteria for ascertaining that a company, like Twitter, has a monopoly on speech

There's no hard criterion, but YouTube is a great example; it is so dominant in the video industry that either you use their service, or almost nobody will see your videos. Facebook is another one - it is now the only social network of its type, and also owns Instagram. If your content is banned from Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and deranked on Google Search, your audience reach will drop to almost nothing. Just two companies control the majority of speech on the western internet.

Twitter IMO doesn't fit into this pattern; it is quite good with free speech. Richard Spencer still has a Twitter account!

Google/YouTube & Facebook/Instagram together constitute a bloc that can censor a message very effectively.

I agree that Twitter doesn't quite fit this pattern though.

This is a silly argument. The service that Facebook offers is becoming so important that asking people not to use it is like asking people not to breathe, and over time it will become moreso.

Try again, your only example that comes close to the scale and number of users of FB (2.6B MAU), is PRC (1.4B citizens), and that does not exactly help your case that FB is too powerful.

I quit FB many years ago, because I'm technically and historically literate. And yet there are billions of other people who are not, and who do use it, and this strongly effects my life

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

Zuckerberg > Murdoch

> The service that Facebook offers is becoming so important that asking people not to use it is like asking people not to breathe

Utterly absurd hyperbole. There are a billions of people in the world who do not use Facebook, comparing the use of Facebook to drawing breath is about as ridiculous as it gets.

MAUs are not a measurement of control over an individual. For the vast majority of Facebook users, Facebook is a very small slice of their life composing only a few minutes of activity per use. If someone opens up the Facebook app for 5 minutes a month they are considered a MAU. Suggesting that browsing an app for a few minutes out of a day is comparable to authoritarian control over 1.4 billion people demonstrates a complete lack of perspective in reality.

It's not ridiculous. If you want to have friends, promote a brand etc in the modern world you need these networks.

The reason that activists engage in deplatforming activity is that it's effective at destroying movements; brands like Milo Yianopolous and Generation Identity were totally destroyed by deplatforming by a few key social networks.

I can provide the evidence on those if you don't believe me.

What measurement would you suggest we use to approximate the number of people whose communication is under the control of a particular organization?

>If someone opens up the Facebook app for 5 minutes a month they are considered a MAU. Suggesting that browsing an app for a few minutes out of a day is comparable to authoritarian control over 1.4 billion people demonstrates a complete lack of perspective in reality.

Your strawman is what lacks perspective of reality. The average FB user spends 30-60 minutes on Facebook each day, depending on the source.

> What measurement would you suggest we use to approximate the number of people whose communication is under the control of a particular organization

You'd first have to a establish a definition for the term "control".

> The average FB user spends 30-60 minutes on Facebook each day

Voluntarily interacting with an app for 45 minutes a day does not in any concevibile interpretation meet the definition of "control". The user is literally in complete control of the apps they interact with on their phone or computer.

> If you want to have friends, promote a brand etc in the modern world you need these networks.

A total falsehood that is easily disproven by the many millions of people who have friends that don't use social media and the many thousands of successful companies that don't advertise on social media.

Unlikely.

>You'd first have to a establish a definition for the term "control"

Let me google that for you:

>control: the power to influence or direct people's behavior or the course of events.