[wpietri]

Good thing they aren't monopolies, then. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and Reddit are are all very popular places for people to post their views. And that's not counting the myriad lesser places like the one we're using now. And of course anybody can drop a few bucks on a blog of their own.

I also disagree that sites moderating is against the intent. Freedom of speech is one right, but so is freedom of association. Should HN be required by law to platform anybody with an "unpopular fringe opinion"? I'd say no. Using government power to force participation in speech someone finds odious is just as bad as using government power to shut down speech.

[SilverRed]

>And of course anybody can drop a few bucks on a blog of their own.

And no one will read it unless you can post links on facebook, twitter and reddit. In the end, almost all communication online runs through a limited set of american megacorps who all act in the same ways, have the same rules and align to the same culture.

It's no surprise China and Russia ban American sites because those sites control the debate and culture of the places that use them.

[munk-a]

I do think there is a problem with how tightly some big corporations have locked down social media - but the 1st amendment (and equivalent laws elsewhere) don't cover the requirement that anyone actually listen to your speech.

I think if we see social media as being a necessary modern medium for speech then we're going to need to get a government sponsored something in the mix - whether that is a common required protocol for messaging or a full blown nationalized social network is an open debate we can have. The main issue is that as long as we're blindly trusting the market to fix itself - it has decided the fix is that monopolies are great when nobody is breaking up big tech companies.

[tshaddox]

> And no one will read it unless you can post links on facebook, twitter and reddit.

I suppose the question is how long that list of websites really is, and how long it needs to be before people stop calling all those websites "monopolies." Obviously it would be fairly absurd to say "no one will read your website unless you can post links on site 1, site 2, site 3, ... site 3,109,550, and therefore those 3.1 million websites are monopolies."

[lmm]

Long enough that they don't co-ordinate, essentially, which would show in how they acted. When facebook, twitter and reddit all announce the same kind of moderation changes within a few months of each other, you can tell that they're a de-facto cartel, and the specifics of how that happens (such as whether they directly communicated with each other) are kind of irrelevant.

[stevenicr]

I believe there are a LOT of people in the world that would think if your site does not come up in gooogle than it doesn't exist.

I remember reading that there are huge populations in which 'the internet' is facebook - so if fbk censors you - you do not exist.

[pessimizer]

Also, your site will not come up in google.

Google is just another social network that people are gaming (with the lazy consent of the people who run it.) Even if you make it, you can be wiped off google as easily as off twitter, no matter what your traffic.

[monoideism]

I'm more or less in agreement with you on all of those companies except Twitter. Twitter is a notable exception and absolutely does have a monopoly on the social media sector as a "public square" - one which features almost every major politician, journalist, analyst, and activist on the platform, including at times, the US President and many other heads of state. And because of the network effect, this monopoly is unlikely to be challenged in the coming years.

Twitter sought out exactly this kind of political influence, so I'm not sympathetic to any complaints they may have now that they have that influence and are in the spotlight.

In an ideal world, Twitter would have been created as a government site and thus subject to the 1st Amendment, but given that we're not in that world, legislation is needed. I'm willing to concede the other social media companies you cited have competition and/or don't play the central role Twitter plays in the US political process.

Finally, there would be Freedom of Association on Twitter even if it were subject to 1st Amendment rights - no one is forced to follow anyone, and everyone is free to block anyone at all. It should be almost exactly analogous to real-life: you should have the right to associate with whomever you like in our country, but you should not have the right to expel them from the country.

[aliasEli]

I think a very important reason for Twitter's influence is that it is very easy to include tweets in an article. This saves editorial work. There is no need to paraphrase/extract parts of a longer article and so it mostly avoids the problems around incorrect quotes. It also makes attribution of your sources easier because the tweet is the source itself. Of course, Twitter is a horrible platform for nuanced opinions, but these do not seem to be very popular nowadays.

[gowld]

The First Amendment has always applied to private property "town squares" that are open to public, originally this was decided in the case of indoor shopping malls.

[wpietri]

I believe that's incorrect: https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/about/faq/do-individua...

If you're thinking of Pruneyard v Robbins, that only applies in CA. And that wasn't based on the 1st Amendment, but on California's own constitution.

[lmm]

I think/hope there would be raised eyebrows if government agencies set up shop in private malls. Malls have realistic alternatives. Twitter doesn't, even for some government services.

[wpietri]

If Twitter's so incredibly powerful and important, why is it worth 5% of Facebook or 2% or Amazon (which owns Twitch) or Google (which owns YouTube)? That doesn't sound like a dominant market position to me.

A large proportion of the people you mention are active on multiple platforms. Some of them aren't active on Twitter at all. Twitter does have a particular market niche, but it's only the 16th most popular platform in terms of global active users: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

And freedom of association is a right that Twitter's owners also have. They are not obliged to serve anybody they don't want to.

[vineyardmike]

So, I’m not going to claim if it’s a monopoly or not directly, but just provide new angles on this debate…

Twitter may have an x% of market valuations of other companies… but that doesn’t have to be the only metric we base decisions off of. Amazon is more than twitch, so has a bigger evaluation. But obviously that other business doesn’t compete with Twitter.

Twitter might account for (eg) 25% of phone use time (and say fb accounts for another x%). So maybe we define the market as user attention. That might make more sense than a strictly financial approach.

Or maybe, like the OP said, Twitter has 90% of all political actors on it, when the next platform has only 25%. Or maybe it has 75% of all public political discourse. Maybe defining the market as saturation of politicians. After all, it’s way harder to compete if you have to convince all existing politicians to move.

These metrics are harder to gather, but might be more useful to gauge how dominant Twitter is in the political sphere. When people discuss monopoly, they often don’t care about the (vague and interpreted) laws per se, they actually care about how a company has somehow come to be dominant and influential in a negative way.

Throughout American history, antitrust rules has been used against mostly large businesses that were unpopular (politically and colloquially). Business and society had changed a lot, especially with the internet, so if there is a political push, defining monopoly policies against another target and definition is inevitable.

[wpietri]

Sure. Many things are possible. Twitter could be using an embedded hypnotron in their apps to control elite opinion. But when people are talking about effectively nationalizing one company because they don't like its moderation policies, I think we need more than speculation.

And you might not care about why we have antitrust laws or how monopoly impairs free markets. But I sure do.

If somebody wants to make the claim that Twitter has too much power in some way unrelated to monopoly, they're welcome to take a swing at that. But that's a very hard claim to make in that without an actual monopoly, I don't see a plausible mechanism for unfair dominance. Not only is it possible to compete with Twitter, many companies, some of them with vastly more resources, already do. I'd say the rise of TikTok demonstrates there's no particular barrier to entry, and Gab and Parler are eternally claiming success in attracting millions of users.

[monoideism]

> Gab and Parler are eternally claiming success in attracting millions of users.

So Gab and Parler should be absolutely free to operate as they wish, in accordance with US laws?

(Because there many folks who like Twitter's moderation who also believe Gab and Parler should be run off the internet, and have tried their best to do so)

[wpietri]

I think Gab and Parler should face no legal sanction for hosting content that is legal but awful. But people critical of that also have freedom of speech, and everybody involved has freedom of association. Telling Gab's vendors that maybe they should stop helping Nazis is just as much "in accordance with US laws" as anything on Gab, so I don't see on what grounds you could object to it.

[XorNot]

Except there's no barrier of entry to Twitter's marketplace. Twitter doesn't somehow prevent users installing other apps. They aren't a natural monopoly, seeing as how Facebook has been taking shots at that space for years.

This bizarre HN notion that every big company is a "monopoly" needs to die. Being popular doesn't make you a monopoly.

[monoideism]

I'm not really arguing from an antitrust perspective. My argument is more focused on the central role that Twitter plays in our political process. If you have a better word to use for that concept than "monopoly", I'll edit my post. But I'm sure you disagree with my thesis either way.

That said, from an antitrust perspective, there are strong arguments against some social media companies, particularly Facebook. Furthermore, there is a barrier to entry for Twitter: the network effect. It's an incredibly strong barrier.

Finally, of course not every big company is a monopoly.

[bobthepanda]

The network effect is a big barrier until it isn't, and this can happen rather quickly.

Digg. Myspace. Snap. Tumblr. Honestly even Facebook itself; how many young people are opening new accounts on Facebook? For now people have moved onto Instagram but this is the only trick I'm aware of pulled off successfully.

[XorNot]

You are not entitled to an audience. A monopoly requires an actual barrier, not a social one: i.e. physically limited space in telecommunication conduits in cities, for example.

[wpietri]

And I think you've put your finger on it. A lot of people confuse a right to free speech with a right to be heard. They are BIG MAD that they don't have a god-given right to a large platform. Not that they built the platform and not that they contribute to its upkeep. But they still have strong feelings of entitlement.

[tshaddox]

> My argument is more focused on the central role that Twitter plays in our political process. If you have a better word to use for that concept than "monopoly"

What's the concept then, other than that Twitter is doing things that you don't like? That's obviously not a sufficient argument, and if antitrust law isn't the reason for legal action to be taken against them, what's the reason? The only other legal course I could imagine is significant changes to media laws (which I'm certainly not opposed to, but those seem more difficult to argue for than antitrust action), or perhaps going at it from the other side and changing the laws around how public figures must communicate with the public.

[throwawaysea]

A business doesn’t have to be a monopoly per the current legal definition for it to be subject to regulation. We can simply require social media companies to accept all customers. We can make political views a protected class that prevents denial of service at businesses in general. We can treat these tech companies as utilities because they operate the public town square. There are numerous routes for us to fix the current situation, where a small number of employees controlling these companies with billions of users, can become the sole arbiters of can communicate and what they can communicate. It just requires that we start talking about it, educate people about the problem, and build political will.

[wpietri]

We probably can't "simply" do that, in that the Constitution is a document with actual meaning.

I would also note that there are existing platforms that effectively make political views a protected class. It turns out they are not very popular, because most people don't want to hang around with people for whom the 14 Words are an important political view.

In practice, a platform can either have haters or the people they hate. Insisting a platform accept all the haters means you're guaranteeing the people they hate will go elsewhere. That's why Twitter has moved away from the sort of policies you favor. As an example, look at when Milo Yiannopoulos led a wave of racist abuse toward Leslie Jones. Twitter had to choose between keeping her (and a lot of her fans and people who just don't like open racism) or Yiannopoulos and his fans.

So the notion that we should override the Bill of Rights to make Twitter platform everybody is not only anti-freedom, but also won't in practice work. If somebody doesn't like Twitter's rules, they should do what you're doing: post somewhere else. There are platforms ready and waiting to take them.

[monoideism]

How do you think antitrust laws were created in the first place?

[vineyardmike]

Monopoly is mostly a political definition throughout American history. The policies and laws have been shaped to target businesses not always strictly based on actual market definition in a textbook sense.

[donw]

> Except there's no barrier of entry to Twitter's marketplace.

There absolutely is. Twitter enjoys an incredible geographic monopoly. The territory just happens to be digital.

[ErikVandeWater]

1. You're using the technical definition of monopoly in a debatable way to hand-wave away the issue. Each of these companies have excessive market influence.

2. All of these companies are already in bed with the government (e.g. illegal NSA spying). They also try to enact policies that are in agreement with politicians agenda as a bargaining chip to get more favorable legislation and enforcement.

[throwawaysea]

Facebook has 3 billion users. Their efforts in censoring / shaping public opinion / propagandizing are broader and more influential than any government. I don’t want to argue about whose definition of monopoly should win. The fact remains that this is a problem and it needs to be addressed with regulation, just like we regulate power utilities. Social media is just utility communication like anything else we call “telecom”, except with massive barriers to competition due to network effects and no requirement for interoperability.

[gowld]

> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Corporations do not have inalienable rights. Only their human members do. They are chartered by the government, to promote the General Welfare.

If the CEO of YouTube wants to flex her rights, she should do it herself, not behind the veil of a corporation.

[wpietri]

Companies do face more constraints than individuals, but the government can't just do whatever it wants. One obvious reason being that companies have owners, and they do have rights.