[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).