[pcmoney]

I am somewhat confused how a middling social network of ~200M (generously) active users with a message limit of 280 chars has a lot of power? Celebrating government strong arming is an interesting take and only nice when its going your way.

Always imagine whatever government excess you are ok with in this instance is now going against your position and see if you still like it.

[portpecos]

Perhaps you're confused, but the rest of Europe isn't confused at how Twitter has a lot of power:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel objected to the decisions [of banning Trump], saying on Monday that lawmakers should set the rules governing free speech and not private technology companies. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-11/merkel-se...

Emmanuel Macron blasts social media platforms for banning Trump https://www.axios.com/macron-social-media-bans-trump-twitter...

[pcmoney]

I don't think you understand free speech in the US context, Twitter is protected by the first amendment, it itself has freedom of speech and of association. It does not have to allow anything it doesn't want on its platform. It could ban everyone wearing blue in their profile photo, it is THEIR platform. If Twitter COULDN'T ban anyone they wanted under US law THEN it would be a violation of free speech.

[Engineering-MD]

And that wouldn’t be an issue if twitter wasn’t so dominant for this form of communication between positions and people. It’s because it is so entrenched without a meaningful equivalent service that this becomes significant.

[pcmoney]

Could you explain how it is dominant? It is literally one tenth the size of Facebook. It is not even one of the top 10 social networks, currently at #17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...

[Engineering-MD]

It’s hard to draw clear lines between domains, but I think for public representation of official organisations, there isn’t any other. So for this purpose it’s dominant.