[fullstop]

1. The government demanding that messages of private citizens be removed is a violation of their First Amendment Rights.

2. Twitter deleting content, banning users, etc, is entirely within their rights and is in no way a violation of anyone's First Amendment Rights.

Twitter is not a government entity. Full stop.

I'm currently sitting on some downvotes, which I find kind of unusual for a topic like this. Here's the text of the first amendment:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Which part, specifically, has Twitter violated?

[AnimalMuppet]

OK, but imagine some rich guy becoming president. Imagine that he owns some companies. Imagine that one of those is a media company. Imagine, for instance, Zuckerberg as president. He ran as part of party X. Now imagine that Facebook (not government, but a private company) suddenly starts deleting content that supports party Y. Is that a problem?

We just had a president with significant business assets, but he owned hotels. The next one may own media companies.

[fullstop]

There's some misunderstanding here. I'm not suggesting that there is no problem. I am saying that it is not violating anyone's first amendment rights and I am absolutely correct on that matter.

[BitwiseFool]

I concede that you are correct based on the letter of the law but I think the spirit of the law is being violated in a significant way.

[fullstop]

... but it's not. The entire purpose of that amendment was to prevent congress from passing laws which infringe on your rights, and Twitter is definitely not the congress or the government.

The USA is a capitalist society. If there is a market for an "uncensored" social media platform, the invisible hand of the market will take care of it, right? Even so, you yourself are likely pro-censorship in some way. Surely you are against child porn being on Twitter, likely along with discussion about planning mass shootings, bombings, and things of that nature. We all have a line that is drawn between what is acceptable and what is not.

[BitwiseFool]

>"the invisible hand of the market will take care of it, right?"

I don't see this happening and I think the premise is flawed. In fact it looks like the dominant players in the market ganged up on nascent competitors like Parler and shut them out of the ecosystems they created. In practical terms, when payment processors, server hosting companies, domain registrars, and app stores ban you, how are you even supposed to compete? Sure, you can theoretically bootstrap your own payment processor, cloud service provider, even your own smartphone ecosystem with gobs of cash, but we all know that's not going to happen.

[fullstop]

Would you agree that, perhaps, your concern lies more with monopolies and not with censorship? Dominant players shutting out competitors is one of the most capitalist things that I can think of.

[stale2002]

Ok... Now what if what people actually care about is not being censored?

To give an example, if there are two situations, situation 1 is that the government comes to my house, and threatens me for speech that I made, and situation 2, is that the mob comes to my house, and threatens me for my speech, the thing that is on my mind is not "Well, situation 1 is a violation of my speech rights, and situation 2 isnt!".

Like, literally that does not matter. Nobody cares about that technically that you keep talking about. What matters is that I don't want someone coming to my house and threatening me, regardless if it is the government, or the mob.

[fullstop]

It's not a technicality. One is limits that we have carefully placed on our government to prevent such abuse. The other is a matter for the police and the legal system.

This is akin to a private company only allowing men to vote in board meetings, and people saying that it's violating the 19th amendment. Is it wrong? Absolutely! But it's not violating the 19th amendment.

I'd also argue that a lot of people care about this "technicality". Businesses are not the government, end of story. The 1st amendment is quite succinct, and there's little room for misinterpreting it.

[BitwiseFool]

>"Twitter is not a government entity. Full stop."

That's exactly my point. You can violate the principles of liberty freely as long as you aren't "the government". And the beauty of it is that people will defend you while you do it.