[throwaway894345]

> This discussion _is_ about the US (but also other governments) censoring Twitter posts.

Presumably the US is genuinely asking Twitter to take down posts, not invoking any hard power to coerce Twitter. That runs counter to free speech ideals, but it's not a strict violation of Twitter's rights. If there is a victim, it's the folks whose Tweets are being taken down, insofar as the de facto public square is privately owned and thus not subject to first amendment protections (Twitter can legally, unilaterally censor the de facto public square).

[reedjosh]

> Presumably the US is genuinely asking

This is probably the first honest argument I've seen in this thread about whether this is legal or not.

Personally I believe this is not the case. I believe there is a lot more coercion behind these asks then we're seeing, but that aside I also agree that.

> That runs counter to free speech ideals

and

> Twitter can legally, unilaterally censor the de facto public square

but, shouldn't we be wary of even a non-coercive relationship like this where government and corporations enter into mutually beneficial monopoly supporting relationships?

All that said, I will be firing up a Mastadon server shortly. (It's been on my bucket list for a bit now.)

[ryandrake]

Twitter is not the public square. It's not even a public utility. It's a private company. It's more akin to a newspaper's "letters to the editor" section. Users send X to Twitter, and Twitter chooses to distribute X to its other users. A real public square does not have an intermediary with moderation power.

We don't have an Internet equivalent to the public square. Maybe 4chan, but even they moderate (child porn, etc.), and technically, your messages still get posted through an intermediary. Maybe there are darknet sites that are true "unfiltered, unhosted, broadcast to everyone" social media, I don't know. Maybe SMS is the public square, but there's (thankfully) no way to broadcast an SMS to the world.

[throwaway894345]

Whether or not Twitter the platform has some technical feature in common with the public squares of olde is missing the point. The concern is that a significant volume of our national dialogue (and indeed the dialogues of many nations) is hosted on Twitter, to the extent that many people (including the very same people who think Twitter's "censorship" is a Very Good Thing) are concerned that Twitter is a vector through which foreign state actors can and have indirectly influence democratic elections (if state actors can do it indirectly then that implies that Twitter the company can do it directly). Even if you aren't convinced that Russia used Twitter to game the 2016 POTUS election, there's a larger umbrella of concerns about the outsized influence of social media companies (for example, the various arguments levied in The Social Dilemma).