[jlawson]

This is really the critical factor.

Anti-speech pro-corporate-authority advocates always try to put these monopolistic, unescapable megacorporations in the same category as some local mom-and-pop operation. It's a massive intentional category error; megacorps are not little companies you can just walk awawy from. There is a point where a corporation's influence becomes so unescapable and so capable of greatly degrading your life that it must be treated in some ways like a government, for the same reasons we treat government differently from just another company or citizen.

The same reason that the phone company or a company that owns all the local roads or water mains can't decide to "stop serving" you because they don't like your religion.

[belltaco]

>The same reason that the phone company or a company that owns all the local roads or water mains can't decide to "stop serving" you because they don't like your religion

Because it's hard to impossible to get alternate services for roads, water and electricity, i.e common carriers. But there are plenty of neo nazi forums, Gab, Truth Social, Parler, 4chan for racists to express and spread their views.

[AstralStorm]

There already are common carriers for communication, see email services.

These are unmoderated, just spam filtered. Forums, social sites and video sharing sites are typically not one of these, and the distinction is important. The most important distinct piece is ownership. Shen you signed the Terms of Service with say YouTube, you granted them rights that vastly exceed ones a common carrier has.

[scarface74]

Email is not carrier and is not regulated as such. I can create a private mail server, invite users and keep any email from being delivered that I so choose.

[cowtools]

Ridiculous idea. Sure, you can run your own private email server... and watch as your messages go to everyone else's spam. It does not matter what SPV, DMARC bullshit hoop you jump through. Ultimately google gets to decide what email providers live and what email providers die.

It is analogous to creating your own postal service or phone company that only lets you send letters to users of the same postal service or phone company. The service is only useful due to network effects.

[vel0city]

But it actually is almost impossible to truly start your own phone company, in terms of running wires to people's homes or putting up towers. The capital expenditures and regulatory hurdles are near impossible, save for extremely well financed and well connected people.

I've had SMTP servers which have extremely high deliverability rates hosted for <$100/mo for over a decade.

The capital expenditures are nowhere near comparable. The regulatory burdens are nowhere near comparable.

Email providers are not common carriers. Its very easy to just sign up for a different email provider. Its easy to buy a domain name and update MX records across literally hundreds of commercial providers eager to have your business. And even if every single host bans you (you really should then question what you're doing if nobody wants your business) its still technically possible to go it on your own. And once again, as long as you're not being generally abusive its possible to have good success.

Comparing getting banned from Gmail might as well be the same as comparing getting banned from McDonalds. McDonalds isn't a common carrier no matter how much you like Big Macs. There's plenty of other restaurants available.

[scarface74]

And people can subscribe to your messages over RSS, you can create website, people can whitelist your email address via rules, etc.

[scarface74]

So users have to use Google?

[0xBDB]

"Because it's hard to impossible to get alternate services for roads, water and electricity, i.e common carriers."

You are omitting telephone service, which is also a common carrier despite being arguably more competitive than the Big 3 cloud providers.

That's where I personally would come down. This decision is ridiculous; social media companies are highly competitive. But I am much, much less comfortable with AWS kicking off Parler.

[deepsquirrelnet]

Those places should allegedly be held to the same standards in suppression of speech. Only they don’t have numbers to withstand the destruction of their platform if, say, numerous other people suddenly showed up to disagree with them.

[vel0city]

Facebook doesn't own all the local roads or water mains though. They're one website. It's just as easy to go to twitter.com as it is truthsocial.com or mastodon.social.

If Comcast owned practically the only ISP in my area then yes they should be considered a common carrier and shouldn't be able to discriminate traffic that isn't trying to break their stuff. In that case they would be the company that owns the roads or the water mains. Facebook isn't like that in the slightest.

[SantalBlush]

Facebook, Twitter, etc. are not even close to inescapable. It's remarkably easy to leave those sites for one of the hundreds of other social media sites out there. We're using a nice one right now.

[fzeroracer]

I've never been forced into using Twitter, Facebook etc. I've always been forced into choosing one of two ISPs, usually Comcast or Verizon.

Could you explain how these two things are identical?

[scarface74]

You mean corporations have a monopoly on violence like the government has where they can legally take away your property and liberty.

[jlawson]

Yes. A handful of megacorps acting together (and they all act together generally) can take away your property by banning you, which makes it impossible to have a normal career in fields as diverse as academia, creative media, journalism, tech, and many others. If you're running a small business and trying to promote it, being banned from social media is a huge hit as well.

They already have taken away your liberty to speak your mind in the common public square of our society - social media - because you know they'll ban you if you say any of a wide variety of things, leading to the consequences described above.

[scarface74]

The common public square is just that - paid for and maintained with public money.

Trump doesn’t seem to have any issue getting his message out or getting people to come to his rallies.

Before the internet existed, the entire civil rights movement was organized by leaders going to churches - even though the locations were actively being bombed, leaders were being arrested, water hosed, lynched, bitten by police dogs, etc.

Cry me a river that some conservatives can’t post on Twitter.

[jakelazaroff]

Okay, but how are they “inescapable”? I hear this argument a lot, but no one can seem to dot that very important i.

If I can’t use Facebook, I can use Reddit. If I can’t use YouTube, I can use Vimeo. If I can’t use Instagram, I can use TikTok or Snapchat. If conservatives get banned from Twitter, there’s a bevy of conservative-leaning Twitter clones. Plus Mastodon, which you can’t get banned from because you can just set up your own instance.