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by sneak 1806 days ago
Editorial control over twitter.com is Twitter's freedom of expression as well.

Their censorship is abhorrent, but shouldn't be illegal.

5 comments

> Editorial control over twitter.com is Twitter's freedom of expression as well.

That's debatable. What twitter decides to promote, in feeds and other things via algorithms, certainly falls under their freedom of expression. But their "editorial control" currently also extends over hosting comments by others as well (which they can choose not to promote), and that is questionable and arguably could be made illegal. We had a recent discussion on an article by a legal scholar that argues for this distinction:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27762145

> Editorial control over twitter.com is Twitter's freedom of expression as well.

Indeed. I don't know why more people don't see this; also note that recommendations are the speech of the person, algorithm, or company doing the recommending.

Indeed the freedom of speech requires the freedom from speech too.

It's as important to be able to not speak as it is to speak.

I would agree, except in the case of a monopoly, or a consortium of companies acting together as a monopoly. And in this case I would say that the social media companies enforcing the same censorship policies counts. Remember when AWS terminated Parler's account, and then no other cloud providers would work with them? It's nothing new that we require private entities that become too big and powerful to give rights to customers that they normally wouldn't. e.g. a utility company can't set whatever price they want like any other company could.
I agree Twitter should be able to censor, but the government shouldn't be able to ask Twitter to do so.

This article is specifically about the government asking Twitter to do so.