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by SpicyLemonZest 1994 days ago
Twitter just does not have anywhere close to monopoly control on the flow of information. Only 20% of the country uses it at all.
1 comments

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.

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.
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.

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.)