Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

I think this is going to be a discussion thread that is almost inevitably going to be a shitshow, but anyway:

There are people who advocate the idea that private companies should be compelled to distribute hate speech, dangerously factually incorrect information and harassment under the concept that free speech is should be applied universally rather than just to government. I don't agree, I think it's a vast over-reach and almost unachievable to have both perfect free speech on these platforms and actually run them as a viable business.

But let's lay that aside, those people who make the argument claim to be adhering to an even stronger dedication to free speech. Surely, it's clear here that having the actual head of the US government threatening to shut down private companies for how they choose to manage their platforms is a far more disturbing and direct threat against free speech even in the narrowest sense.

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.

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".