Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

It is an unacceptable form of censorship to hand over our modern day equivalent of the public square to private companies, and then allow them to police what people say in it.

Freedom of speech was always intended to be protected in public. The Internet is now our equivalent of the public space. It is time this problem is solved once and for all, and the Internet is now reclassified as both a public utility and a public space.

Yes, those of us with technical know-how can argue that personal websites are that equivalent. But this is depriving those that see Twitter, Facebook, et. al. as a public platform, of the right to have their voice heard. A tweet is now the equivalent of a placard on the street. Do we really want to censor that because we messed up in how we allowed the Internet to be run?

Disagree, because street space is limited, whereas there are a multiplicity of websites you can go to. It isn’t just a matter of personal websites. There’s a Twitter-like, Gab, which can be used. The president and his multi-million dollar campaign apparatus could easily strike a deal with Gab to host some more Gab servers and get their message out via Gab to anyone of their twitter followers who wants to sign up.

Never mind that Trump is not actually being censored on twitter in any way - his message still went out to all his followers, simply with an appended notice that Twitter itself considers the message to be factually wrong.

EDIT: this is like saying that the President has the right to publish whatever content he wants in a specific newspaper. Back in the day, a city might have a dozen newspapers - they could each print what they liked and if they decided not to print a person’s letter to the editor, that was no violation of free speech. Or if they print the letter to the editor with a note explaining they disagree with it, that certainly doesn’t violate free speech either.

We will never see protests of the 60s and 70s scale today in person. People do what they did back then online. And they don't go out and protest because they feel like their voice is being broadcast enough through social media. And yet to have that censored by private companies is unacceptable when that in the modern day use case.

Nobody sees a news-paper as a public space. The fact that anybody can make a social media account and instantly publish information that can be read by anybody, and the fact that people conceptually now see public profiles as public spaces, means that we need to treat them that way.

This just doesn’t make sense to me. Ever since the first anti-spam technology was deployed, online web forums and mailing lists have employed moderation. There’s law on this going back to the early 1990s when AOL and CompuServe had to moderate their platforms. Nothing has really changed except that there are more options and more ways to get the message out than ever before.

Want a public space? Simply get a server and throw up a phpBB or wordpress or mastodon or gab or GNUSocial instance and you’ve got your own space. As president, trump could easily get the word out via email to his millions of registered supporters and they would flock to the new space and post there.

The fact that 3 billion people (from a quick Google search) are now using social media means that the goal posts have changed. 3 billion people are using the services of private companies to make their voices publicly heard. They think that they are exercising their right to freedom of speech by using something so accessible and ubiquitous. As accessible as public squares used to be.

To turn around and say "sorry, social media might be really easy to use and might be the primary form of communication for most people in the first world, but private companies should be able to control that" is very disingenuous.

The reason this is so tricky is that there is simply no historical precedent for this level of hyperconnectivity. But I certainly reject the idea of using the old laws of public vs. private companies to dictate how we as a society use the publicly accessible and readable internet.

People who have been de-platformed can always go to Gab (I know they had issues being dropped a few times but my understanding is they have adopted a decentralized approach and resolved it). It is freely available on the internet. The only reason people are using Twitter instead of Gab is that the marketplace prefers the lightly-moderated Twitter to the complete free-for-all of Gab. Edit: again, Trump is a billionaire, he could easily fund more Gab servers and blast it out to his followers and get his message out.

> People don't go out and protest anymore because they do it online.

I invite you to visit Washington DC whenever the virus is over and see the large in-person protests that regularly happen in the nation’s capital.

Never mind that there’s a physical riot / protest going on yesterday and today over police brutality, today, in Minneapolis.

> And they don't go out and protest because they feel like their voice is being broadcast enough through social media. And yet to have that censored by private companies is unacceptable when that in the modern day use case.

So the reason they aren’t going out in person is because they aren’t being censored. Look at what is going on in Hong Kong over the past year if you want to see what happens when people in the modern internet-connected world are actually angry. You get millions on the street, not just posting online.

No. The reason people are using Twitter is because most other people are using Twitter. The network effect is very real and very strong on social media.

If you wanted to protest something, would you go to the least populated public space that people are gathering, or the most populated?

We have allowed the most highly populated places where people share ideas, to be controlled by a private company. That is not in the spirit of freedom of speech in the slightest.

Anyone who uses the internet has a choice of millions of websites. Everyone using twitter and seeing the twitter notification on Trump’s tweets knows that twitter placed it there. If they were outraged, they can use Google and find alternative social media sites like Mastodon or Gab.

Trump could do the same.

There is simply no comparison to a “public square” since there are easy, accessible alternatives to get the messages out over the internet.

If you want to talk about “public square”, perhaps the easiest comparison would be internet access itself. If ISPs cut off Trump’s internet connection for posting wrong think, that could be seen as a free speech issue I think. But even banning him from any specific individual website is simply a matter for that website’s owner to decide.

Trump has millions of followers on his email lists. He could send out an email or SMS tomorrow inviting his followers to begin posting on a new Donald Trump Gab or Mastodon server. Edit: heck, he could even post it on his twitter!

He chooses to post on twitter instead. He doesn’t even try to use an alternative website.

This is not about restricting his free speech, this is about him trying to drum up controversy.

His speech is not being suppressed. In fact, he’s probably the person who has the least problem in the entire country of being heard or noticed.

Edit: by the way, ask MySpace, AOL, MSN, or other failed once-popular social networks how well the “network effects” worked out. People know how to use a different website if they actually care to do so.

Look at theDonald.win as an example. Reddit banned their forum, so they created a new website where they can post.

Trump has the audience of millions to create a right-wing only website where his followers can chat together if they wish, or he could encourage his followers to join Gab.