[mrlala]

>Does anybody have a solution to the bigger underlying question of de-platforming and censorship on online platforms?

Well as far as politics is concerned.. the US Government (and other governments) should make their own twitter like platforms which every active representative has an account, and ANYTHING (barring pure illegal) can be posted.

It doesn't even need to have an actual user base, it can just be somewhere to go to see what your politician is thinking.

In terms of the average person? There is no solution for one that is owned by a corporation. An offshoot of the above is the government could make a social media site that is covered under "free speech that the government cannot take away" and anything not blatantly illegal can be posted/said. I would not advocate for this though.. I think we have plenty of options.

But the one for politicians only is something that should be seriously considered.

[bryananderson]

This exists. The government provides the President, the executive departments, and each Senator and Representative with their own websites. They may issue any kind of communications there, including setting up blogs or microblogs.

[allendoerfer]

That's a bad idea, because you are cementing power. It would be hard for contenders to get into office. The incumbents already have a bigger platform they can leverage.

I was also getting at the fact, that Twitter, being a private company or not, basically became infrastructure and was thinking about how it should behave, whether that would be enforced by laws or not.

[medium_burrito]

A highly scaleable free Twitter clone for the entire world run by the US government could be built in a year or two on AWS. If you don't need to build the giant ad network, it's much simpler.

[wizzard]

> Well as far as politics is concerned.. the US Government (and other governments) should make their own twitter like platforms which every active representative has an account, and ANYTHING (barring pure illegal) can be posted.

> It doesn't even need to have an actual user base, it can just be somewhere to go to see what your politician is thinking.

That's just called a blog. The value of social media for politicians is the "social" part.

[mrlala]

>That's just called a blog. The value of social media for politicians is the "social" part.

Actually no, the "value" in Twitter for politicians is

* Short succinct messages - people don't want to read a book from their politician for every issue. If it's important and does need more, then they tweet the image of more text or whatever. But most of the time a simple headline does suffice. Otherwise twitter wouldn't be where it is.

* The tweet can be linked from anywhere else on the internet, and everyone "knows" what it should look like and can basically distinguish reality from fake stuff

* Like the above, it's uniform and simple. Someone else commented to me that each politician has access to a website or something. Did anyone else know this? I sure didn't, yet I've seen a billion links to twitter for politicians.

* It would be really sad to learn that politicans are reading replies to their tweets. I don't know how they could get anything else done. Have you ever scanned through a twitter thread from any one of trump's tweets? There is nothing of value, and it's so invaluable that I bet you everyone in the world would be better off with read-only tweets from politicians!