[meh99]

You’re right I forgot communication didn’t exist before Twitter and iPhones. How silly of me.

God said let their be Steve Jobs and suddenly human communication…

Privately owned infrastructure was never for you. It’s for the elites to corral you all along.

Believing Twitter was ever on your side was your first mistake. They were Walmart; moved in with low prices now they’re raising them.

It’s an emotional con to keep you focused on a political narrative (American dream of free enterprise; for some, toil for depreciated wages for the majority) and not exploring alternative communication pipelines.

How free is our speech if it’s constrained to Wall Street, tech companies, SV, and DC? You walked right into constrained speech in order to fit in.

[armagon]

Certainly it is true that speech existed before the Twitter and the iPhone, and continues to today.

I (theoretically) could start my own newspaper and spread my opinion around, or go house to house and tell people there will be a meeting on a specific topic. With enough work and funds, I may be able to air my own television or radio station. I could do a letter writing campaign and spam everyone in a specific area code. I could scrawl graffiti on buildings to try to spread word for my cause.

All of these are good things, but it seems silly to me to be allowed to speak, but not be allowed to speak where people are listening.

And, I fear, all of these could be negated, too.

Imagine, for example:

- you are free to speak, but your newspaper is bad for the environment and must not be allowed (while others newspapers serve the public interest and are fine)

- you are allowed to transmit your TV or Radio program, but your license will be revoked if you talk about certain subjects.

- you can paint messages all you like, so long as they are inside your house

- you standing in the public square on your soapbox violates my safe space and must be disallowed

- you can speak freely, but only inside your own head (or far away from civilization), for your every word is being tracked and you'll be cut off from the economy if you don't say the right things

Fortunately, I don't think we're very far towards any of those dystopian ideas.

Truly, Twitter is not required to let me tweet, nor is YouTube mandated to let me post a video, but given the monopoly on attention they have within their spheres, if I can't speak there, my ability to speak freely has definitely been curtailed.

[Covzire]

These SV companies amassed a level of power over the public square that nobody saw coming. Especially during a time of lockdowns the only speech that American citizens had with their other citizens was via 3 platforms, all of which were stiffling free speech, even to the point of banning some CSPAN coverage of a politician that represents them.

[meh99]

That’s a blatant lie, or more generously, harmfully ignorant perspective.

Academics, thinkers, have been warning about private power eroding public for decades.

Oh sure SV specifically is new NOW, but they haven’t done anything Walmart didn’t do to little communities decades before, or ATT hasn’t done; co-opt control of public government for private gain.

I’m done with this community. It’s a bunch of ostriches who are equivocating their failures as political agents; don’t login. They lose their power.

Stop living in the bespoke simulation in your head.

[Covzire]

And newspapers also, long before Walmart was choosing which books or magazines or music to stock. But Walmart has never had direct control over the public square at the incredibly grand scale that Twitter, Facebook and Youtube do, that's the point.