[TheGrim-999]

These companies have near monopoly control on the flow of information. Like it or not, they are the new public square. Just telling someone that's banned from Twitter, Facebook, etc., "but oh don't worry, you're still free to go downtown and hold up a sign and spread your message!", while everyone else is able to reach millions of people instantly, is not a solution, and you all know it isn't. Telling someone they can start their own website and not use Twitter, and then de-platforming the website they start, is not a solution, and you all know it isn't.

Seriously, look at the state of things. The left has decided to censor the President of the United States. They routinely censor and de-platform anyone that has differing political opinion, and they use disgusting tactics to do so, by just calling anyone that disagrees with them racist, evil, inciting violence etc., no matter how remotely those labels actually apply. Not to mention that the words no longer have any meaning and have been constantly redefined to mean whatever they want it to mean.

Anyone with different politics are banned from their platforms. If they try to start their own platforms then DNS providers ban them, payment providers ban them, companies drop them, app stores ban them. Like someone mentioned elsewhere, what's next? Does anyone not a leftist need to create their own mobile networks? Lay their own fiber? When the left puts an end to this too, what's next? It's already gone to an unacceptable level of censorship and destruction.

You really want to see how evil starts? This is it. A group of people so convinced that they're morally just, better than everyone else, just like every evil regime that ever existed, that have justified to themselves that everyone else is evil, that it's fine to do evil things to them, that's it's fine to literally burn books because the knowledge conflicts with their ideology, that it's OK to do evil things to those that they've deemed to be evil, and that, conversely, nothing they do is evil. That everything they do is "fighting for Democracy!", yet everything anyone else does is the literal death of Democracy. The supreme irony being that of course complete censorship and destruction of any opposing ideas is so obviously the death of democracy. Always getting your way is not democracy.

It's evil, pure and simple, from top to bottom. If you ever wondered how an evil regime forms, how people support it and cheer it on and let it happen, you're witnessing it right here and now.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Twitter just does not have anywhere close to monopoly control on the flow of information. Only 20% of the country uses it at all.

[DenisM]

So you keep saying, but I have to wonder what’s the total reach? If 20% are reading, are they then immediately retelling each to 2 more people? And what if every single news caster, PR agent, and manager is among the 20%?

Also, how much is too much? Is 51% the red line?

I think most fruitful approach is to borrow from the antitrust law - a business should be large enough to distort the entire market. Not quite certain how to apply the metric in this case, but that’s the idea.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I think that's a reasonable argument - it's just very different from the idea that someone literally cannot communicate their message if they're not allowed to do it on Twitter.

[DenisM]

Would you agree that the market place of ideas is crippled by the presence of a “monopoly”?

Not destroyed as a government could do, but crippled.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I don't think it is. There was a time in the 90s when AOL was in a similarly dominant position with much stricter moderation policies, but the marketplace of ideas never felt crippled. Everyone just understood that the AOL sandbox was a sanitized common ground, and if you wanted frank discussions on complex or controversial topics you needed to go elsewhere. (And I don't know of any topic, no matter how controversial or offensive, that doesn't have some active forum where it's regularly discussed.)