Resolved that Twitter can legally boot you for any reason, other than membership in a protected class

Great Debates
1

I don’t give a flying fuck about Facebook, Google, Apple, etc. I don’t care about whether it’s a good thing, a bad thing, or an indifferent thing. If you want to discuss these things, I can point you to several threads that seem to want to discuss this, but that I for the life of me can’t figure out the actual question they want answered.

My stance is that Twitter can indeed legally boot you for whatever arbitrary reason they come up with (excepting as noted in the title, and it’s not a given that they can’t do it for those reasons). They can do so consistently, or inconsistently, and can revoke the suspension for the same reasons, or lack of reasons, if they so choose.

There are no 1st amendment issues, as it is a private enterprise. There are no free expression issues as the number of people on Twitter has no relevance to the audience size some individual might have. Your typical Twitter user has around 20 entities following them and follows around 75 entities. They also post two tweets a month and retweet something once per month. This very post on this very message board will be seen by far more people than your typical tweet. The median tweet has 0 likes and 0 retweets. The barrier for entry for a competing platform is so low as to be almost non-existent.

What Twitter does have is some popular entities. Just like everywhere else, on Twitter popular entities are popular. They gather a large audience as a result of being popular, not as a result of which platforms they choose. That’s what the word popular means, after all. Popular Twitter users will gain popularity on the next quick-blurb social media platform of their choosing. Just like popular Vine posters are now popular TikTok posters. Banning a popular entity hurts Twitter, as it reduces potential user activity, but it’s still their right to do so.

You, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and myself don’t get an audience by default. We either grow one, or we don’t, on Twitter, or elsewhere. Twitter doesn’t owe any of us anything and we can build our own internet platform to shout at the world for the cost of one Five Guys burger a month.

So yes, they can boot you for any reason.

2

Just Twitter? Fine, who cares?

Social media in general? To an extent it is now a public service and ceding control of the ability to publically communicate to private companies is not good. Heaps not good.

3

My thoughts on the matter (all use of “you” is generic):

No one has the “right” to use a private company’s platform. No one loses their “freedom of speech” or is “censored” when that company removes someone from that platform for violating their terms of use. Being held accountable for one’s actions is not “persecution”.

What many are feeling now is not their rights being “trampled”; it’s a sense of petulant entitlement born of wanting to be able to do whatever they want without consequence or accountability. And what they are demanding is that private companies give them whatever they want for free without condition or moderation.

You have a right to free speech, unhindered by the government (with certain pertinent caveats). You do not have a right to make others broadcast it for you. You do not have a right to prevent others from judging you for it. And you do not have a right to avoid the consequences of it.

If you want to argue that social media companies are too powerful and pervasive, fine, but that’s a monopoly issue, not a free speech one.

4

But a legalistic approach ignores the importance of the positive right to free speech.

Things have changed, we need a normative approach instead I believe.

5

So you think we should demand that private companies provide free services to everyone without condition because…we want free stuff? Sounds like the Strawman Liberal model Republicans have been talking about for decades.

6

No the solution will not be simple. Donald got ban hammered in the old fashioned style of boards like ours. Great, a dangerous fuckwit loses some signal.

Letting huge companies without scrutiny or accountability control who gets a voice is cyberpunk nono 101

7

So all television and radio networks should allow anyone who wants a show to have one? Book publishers must publish every submission?

8

Phone companies or ISPs or the Postal service can cut off people?

And yeah you’ve raised the issue of unequal access to various traditional media that has exacerbated historic economic and racial disenfranchisement.

Like I said it’s complex.

9

Phone companies and ISPs are public carriers. The Postal Service is an arm of the federal government.

Twitter is neither, it is not intended to be either, and it should not be treated as either.

10

Right I said fuck Twitter if you like but social media as a whole.

If you’re making an essential public (as in used by all, a means of generating a community) service private, then saying Ah it’s private, let private rules apply, that’s not right.

There has been too much privitisation of public space and it is dangerous to allow it

11

“Social media” is too amorphous a term to really mean anything for the purposes of regulation. Twitter isn’t the same as Facebook, neither of those is the same as Tiktok, all three of those are different than Tinder, and all four of those couldn’t have less in common with the SDMB, but they could all plausibly be grouped under the umbrella of “social media”.

I dispute that social media is an “essential public service”. It’s entirely possible and not at all difficult to get by without it in any form - hell, there are millions of people in this country who don’t even possess the means to access it in the first place.

12

Social media was always private. It was never a public space. And it’s not monolithic, despite there being a few dominant players in the market.

And all the things you appear to be concerned about are really issues of monopoly, not “privatisation of public space”. In fact, you’re literally arguing for the opposite: nationalisation of private enterprises.

13

This fictional definition doesn’t even apply to private companies that offer to display my messages.

14

Sure, you can view it as an antitrust issue. But a monopoly or oligopoly on some key aspect by which we communicate with one another is a far more complex and potentially dangerous problem than a monopoly on widgets. We’re not just talking about squeezing money from consumers by rigging markets. Freedom of expression is of far greater consequence than just economics.

15

Would anyone’s perspective on this change if Rupert Murdoch owned Twitter, I wonder?

16

I meant more like how physical public spaces became privitised, like malls instead of town squares.

It’s analogous.

It’s not just the free speech issues, it’s that the purpose of the platform is at odds with its users. Why live like that?

It’s not just choosing another brand of tomato soup, these are our new communities.

17

Ha sorry I typed so much, that works better.

18

Right now, this country is so fucked with a literal cult indoctrinated with disinformation from Fox News et al, and free speech clearly isn’t working - good ideas are not displacing bad ideas. We’re lucky that the people currently in control of the dominant social media platforms are not evil. They have certainly been ignoring the problem in favor of greater profit, but are now waking up to it, and I think they are trying to do the right thing. In the short term, letting these non-evil dictators handle the immediate problem is better than the status quo ante.

But let’s not pretend that the benign dictator approach to freedom of expression is the proper one, that there’s not a major issue about who controls information and communication in our society that we need to think carefully about.

“The market will take care of it” is a misguided right wing refrain, and I’m a little astonished that many on the left are embracing it here.

19

It’s not a free speech issue, and the purpose of the platform is to sell advertising.

20

Can we set this to rest for this thread, please?

Stipulated, it’s not a free speech issue in the narrow sense that we all know the scope of the U.S. Constitution. But freedom of speech in society is a much broader question. The question is to what extent and by what means we should protect freedom of expression in modern society, not the extent to which current law does protect it.