Thank you, that’s a good summary.
If that ‘newspaper’ does start to get a significant audience, one of the established social media companies will buy it up or freeze it out. A newspaper with no readers does not help the public square to contain a diversity of opinions and ideas.
Other people do not have a government website to turn to. I’m interested in the general case, not Trump specifically.
It’s almost trivially easy to set up your own website. There are a ton of blogging platforms where you can start posting in minutes. You can use non-blogging sites like github to create pages and posts. Twitter in no way has a monopoly on anyone’s freedom of expression.
As I’ve said, Twitter was important to Trump because he made it so. If he had used Instagram or YouTube or medium.com then those sites would have become important and nobody would care about Twitter.
Yup. And there is a reason why he is not able to get around the grownups when he tries to use other media that he should have access.
I got distracted and didn’t follow up here.
This is a poor analogy, as it is not like a phone company. The ISP would be much more analogous, and that would be where getting kicked off would make someone livid.
There is not “facebook internet” and “non-facebook internet” both operate on the same infrastructure. If someone is on facebook, that doesn’t prevent them from being able to come to your blog that you are hosting.
A much better analogy would be like a conference call, where you might get kicked off the call for being disruptive. You can be upset that people don’t have to listen to you, but that’s really the other half of the idea of freedom of speech, is the freedom to not have to listen. You cannot have one without the other.
I’m not worried about facebook’s valuation, but I am concerned about it’s use. It is a useful platform. If they went to a paid subscription model, it would likely be far less useful. Google, too. How much are you willing to pay per search?
Like newspapers, right? Except newspapers are mostly funded by advertising. Tell me what mass media tool is not funded by advertising of some sort. You got BBC, which is funded by the government, is that what you prefer?
I’ve personally gotten pretty good value out of advertising on several mass media platforms, both digital and print. If you remove that advertising, you are not only weakening the platform, making it less useful to users, you are also making it less useful for small businesses that find them to be the best form of advertising that has ever existed.
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of successful internet news sources (my favorite is Talking Points Memo, which has annual revenue in the $millions, IIRC) that demonstrate that you are wrong about this.
Is this just an assertion?
Or do you have any notion of how that would actually work?
So, say Parlor becomes pretty popular with the alt right, and has millions of users. If they refuse to sell, because then they would be beholden to the TOS of someone else, how are you suggesting that they would be “frozen out”?
That’s a terrible analogy. On Twitter you can choose what to read and what to ignore (and block anyone you don’t want to hear from), and one person talking does not stop another from doing so.
Back in the day, I actually did run my own webserver, just for shits and giggles.
It would probably take me less than an hour to get it back up and running, and have my own platform to say anything at all that I wanted to say.
Now, back in the day, I was quite excited when I had a unique hit, as I usually went weeks without one, but that’s not censorship, that’s just not having an audience.
It’s a far far better analogy than that of being kicked off of the telephone network and no longer being able to make calls.
No analogy is perfect, that’s why they are analogies. I think that mine is much more pertinent than the one I was comparing it too, however, in every way that is relevant.
They’re all private companies, so they can shut down or promote whatever the fuck they want, whether I (or anyone else) agree or disagree with the message or messenger. If Twitter drops Biden (or my crush AOC) like a rock tomorrow, you won’t hear me screaming about free speech or free expression. I happen to disagree with their suspension of @Kirtaner, for example, but it’s certainly their right to do so.
Since my focus is on the right of public companies to refuse to host this, I’ll stick to this one. There is no concentrated power to any worrisome degree when it comes to available platforms to spread your message. I won’t say that there are an infinite number of internet platforms, but I will say that the number of possible platforms on the internet is in the neighborhood of 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (and that even excludes possible subdomains), so I don’t think it’s particularly restrictive. On the other hand, there is absolutely a concentration of power over existent massive audiences. Nothing stops someone else from creating a massive audience other than appeal and inertia (and it happens all of the time), so that is also not a roadblock. If you believe that a person has an immediate right to a massive audience, then we’ll just agree to disagree.
“We’ve banned you from the public square, but you’re welcome to set up your soapbox down in this deep dark mineshaft with only the rats to listen to you.”
private companies, dammit. 
Who has been banned from the public square?
I mean, the reason that my personal server never got any hits is because it contained almost no actual useful information for the public, and I didn’t really share it with anyone else.
I found it useful, as I could access certain things from anywhere.
But you are not banned from the public square just because no one stops to listen.
Seriously, look at the arguments that you are making here, they are all about the audience, not the voice. You have made absolutely no coherent argument that anyone is being prevented from speaking, only that they are not being supplied with a ready audience.
And being given an audience has nothing to do with freedom of expression.
I disagree.
Sjuppose you started to get lots of hits on your personal blog, which is largely composed of criticisms of the government.
And the government then pressures your ISP to put chokes on your blog, to make it harder for people to access it.
But you’re still free to post whatever you want. It’s just that the government has taken steps to make sure you won’t have an audience for your blog.
No freedom of expression issue, because you can still post whatever you want?
That would be pretty specifically a matter of the government interfering with my voice.
That is entirely different from people not caring to hear what I have to say.
I’m not entirely sure how that’s even remotely relevant, TBQH.
Which is also entirely different from Jack Dorsey not caring to have other people hear what you have to say.
Is Jack Dorsey pressuring my ISP to put chokes on my blog?
Is Jack Dorsey part of the government?
I have no idea why you feel this is a rabbit hole that you wish to immerse yourself in, but I’m pretty sure I’m not interested in following you any further down it.
Honestly, I’m not sure how true this is. I would imagine it’s actually probably easier to print up a newsletter than create a social media platform.
For your specific question re: Parler, it got angel investment money and some quick backing by conservative commentators. They also got some money from the Mercers. It’s about two years old, but it’s not entirely clear how long it took to develop (probably not that long, the back-end stuff is all standard I think, and it’s hosted by Amazon Web Services, not any in-house hardware).