[websites420]

The issue at stake: governments telling private businesses what they can and can't host on their servers.

Impact of a government social media: If you get banned from Facebook, you have the option to post your non-illegal content on townsquare.us. Therefore, your free speech rights are not being impacted. The right to speak is not the right to be heard by the audience of your choice.

[shkkmo]

There are already tons of sites you can move to if you get banned from a platform, so there is no functional difference.

I get that you don't share concerns about deplatforming, but presenting this as a solution to those concerns is not accurate.

[websites420]

> There are already tons of sites you can move to if you get banned from a platform, so there is no functional difference.

But none of those platforms draw a direct line between the constitutional guarantee of free speech and implementation of that speech. That’s the idea behind the public option: it’s the constitution with teeth, freedom in its purest form, while leaving corporations open to experiment with restrictions as the market demands.

[username90]

If social media is the public square then the government would just seize the servers just liked they seized all the public squares/roads/areas from private people.