[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.