[jkelleyrtp]

They are not a public square. They are not the government.

They are a private company that needs to do business to stay alive. Other companies can choose not to do business with them based on the content that's on their site. If they fail to satisfy their customers, they die.

They cannot satisfy the whims of those who pay nothing and demand a megaphone. They owe you, and your beliefs, nothing.

[drtillberg]

Civilized (and sometimes boorish) people today go to the Internet to communicate. That's what we're doing right now.

Maybe if you (or I) were banned from HN, no big deal, find some other corner of the Internet to shout from. FB and Twitter are the modern public fora however, they have through moats or whatever business tactics, made other fora far less significant, and in terms of discussion space they are a very big deal. You might be correctly repeating legal principles as they appear in last year's hornbook, however, the books will eventually change.

If Cloudflare and Google together delisted and deplatformed anyone repeating any words of the President or major conservative leaders -- that would undermine a core tenet of our democratic society. That would be an obvious affront to first principles. I'm not sure FB and Twitter are greatly removed from that hypothetical.

[cujo]

> Maybe if you (or I) were banned from HN, no big deal, find some other corner of the Internet to shout from.

So is the premise of your argument that we should be protecting the less internet savvy from having to learn how to browse the web?

Give me a break. FB/TW shouldn't be required to uphold the public's ability to communicate.