Without irony, you probably would have less censorship than should a private company own it. Is that a good thing? Not sure. Seems like spam would overtake it quickly.
Sure, until an American president decides to ban another country's account for disrespecting him, or use it for leverage in negotiations, or have the NSA bulk scan their citizens private messages for 'terrorist' communications, or have the algorithm bias other country's newsfeeds in favor of American propaganda.
Twitter is a global platform and much of the world wouldn't trust the US as far as they could throw an American nuke (not withstanding how much they would also trust their own government.) The only reason Twitter works as well as it does now is that its primary concern, as a company, is profit, and not the national interests of one specific country.
That ship long since sailed. Look at Russia, for example. They have basically been cut off from all forms of social media and the president didn’t even need to order them to do it (Even though the president has more or less total power over anything involving international trade). The social media companies did it voluntarily.
I would still prefer it to be the choice of individuals and private platforms, which can be competed with and avoided, than a government. Even if I think blacklisting Russians at every opportunity is a terrible, unproductive and ultimately self-sabotaging move for Americans to make.
> Sure, until an American president decides to ban
Well, that is what the court system, and the supreme court is for.
The court system puts very strong restrictions on what the government is able to do, regarding speech.
Sure, maybe a president would want to do something. And the courts, which have a very established history of protecting speech rights would stop them.
A better solution, though, would be to make a new law that requires twitter to follow similar standards as the government has to follow, in the same way how we put strong restrictions on what telephone companies are allowed to do
(So don't give me any objections about how such laws would be illegal, when we already have them! Use our phone laws as the model, to do something similar, if not exact the same).
Social media companies aren't common carriers. People want them to be so they have to follow the same laws, but they never claimed to be neutral. They have rules, they have distinct cultures and business models. They also exist within an ecosystem of competitors - Twitter being popular doesn't mean they control communications infrastructure. Facebook serving a billion people no more makes it a public good than MacDonald's.
Did you read this part, or are you just going to completely ignore it? "The [modern day] court system puts very strong restrictions on what the government is able to do, regarding speech."
I am not sure how anyone who has read any supreme court opinion in the last 40 years, could come to the conclusion that the government is not strongly prevented from engaging in large speech restrictions.
I read it, I just don't trust it. Not after the Patriot Act, PRISM, Guantanamo Bay and any number of other ways the government has made an end run around its own laws and the courts have let them, or at best not been able to intervene until well after the damage has been done. If the US government really, really wants to break the law, the courts will often look the other way if there's plausible deniability.
Are we really talking about trusting the courts to properly adjudicate a platform with a global userbase and an algorithmically driven feed (designed for psychological control and influence) when the American press is all but universally considered, by Americans, to be controlled by corporate interests and the military industrial complex? We don't even trust CNN to tell us the sun rises in the East and sets in the West but we'll trust the government to have a fair hand at managing Twitter?
I get the argument intellectually, and I'll even concede that it could work in the best circumstance. But I don't believe we live in the world of best circumstance, and i don't trust it to work in practice. Maybe if there were real international controls over the platform. But even then there could be some secret ECHELON BS going on between governments to allow rights abuses on a technicality.
> Are we really talking about trusting the courts to properly adjudicate a platform with a global userbase and an algorithmically driven feed
Ok, well then you are in luck. Because in the context of this thread, it seems like we won't even need the government or the courts to do anything, as Elon is going to be pressuring twitter to do what the open discourse advocates want anyway.
So, just remember, you can't complain about any of this, because it is not the government forcing twitter to have less moderation, instead it is private individuals.
So now everyone wins. You don't have to worry about the government forcing these changes, because private parties are going to force them to have less moderation, and there is very little you can do to stop these moderation changes.
>So, just remember, you can't complain about any of this, because it is not the government forcing twitter to have less moderation, instead it is private individuals.
This is the internet, I will complain about anything I damn well please.
>Because private parties are going to force them to have less moderation, and there is very little you can do to stop these moderation changes.
I can stop using Twitter if I find it objectionable, and if enough people do the same, Twitter will either have to change its policies or a competitor will step in. Because policies aren't laws, and don't require bureaucracy, politics, the intervention of courts or votes to change, private Twitter can change on a dime, whereas public Twitter couldn't.
As hard as it is to stop moderation changes on Twitter, it's easy to avoid Twitter. But if Twitter becomes integrated into the bureaucracy then it becomes as unavoidable as the DMV. The worst Twitter can do about my theoretically objectionable tweets is ban me. The worst the government could do is have me arrested, tortured or killed. I'll take my chances with Elon.
> This is the internet, I will complain about anything I damn well please.
You can complain, but the point is you would be a hypocrite, and none of what you say actually matters.
> I can stop using Twitter if I find it objectionable
Sure you can, and basically nobody else is going to follow, because they are the only major player in that market. So twitter will live on without you, and be perfectly fine.
In fact, it seems that the stock price went up because of the elon news. So the people with the money actually think that it will improve, and you can feel free to waste your time not using the only major platform in twitter's market.
> it's easy to avoid Twitter
Yes, and it is also easy for everyone else to continue to use twitter and not care that you leave. I guess you'll be shouting into the void on platforms that nobody else is using, about how horrible twitter is, and everyone else will continue to not care.
Its a private company and all. They can feel free to choose to have less moderation, and there is nothing you can do about it, but complain in places where nobody will care.
America just had a President who explicitly declared the press to be the enemy of the people.
Ignoring the degree to which the American press voluntarily acts as a propaganda platform[0], the US government absolutely does censor the press, by revoking or controlling press credentials, arresting reporters covering protests, harassment, etc[1].
And the US has historically censored the mail, yes, usually during wartime. But the bigger problem is surveillance - the USPS tracks, photographs and logs all paper mail for government surveillance and law enforcement[2]. The USPS also has a 'covert operations' division that monitors social media posts[3].
You could (correctly) claim that this isn't nearly as bad as the surveillance and censorship regimes elsewhere, but it's difficult to see how making that easier by giving the government direct control over a primary means of global communication makes it less likely.
Isn’t that “ism” largely discredited? He was right, the government/institutions were full of communists. Today they’ve rebranded as socialists, but to my knowledge everything he fought against came to pass.
Attaching the -ism label is just a thought-terminating cliche.
It maybe wasn't "full of communists" but you are right that project VENONA has shown that McCarthy wasn't totally wrong either. Institutions were deeply inflitrated at all levels.
During the Trump administration, their vindictive treatment of the press and the selective removal of access to the White House by outlets not toeing the line more or less amounted to quasi-censorship in practice.
Nationalizing in the traditional sense is not the solution, indeed, but rather hold the platform up to the letter of the constitution. This right now is not exactly possible given that "twitter is a private company", therefore arguably if one puts it in the hands of the government, you have the double-edged sword of potentially being abused by the government, and on the other hand the solution i forementioned on holding it accountable given that it would become public under the law. However, just like with any other gov. institution, being held accountable is more often than not up to the people through their civic initiative and probably not something that the government will do out of interest. So in this regard in US it could work given the nature of the constitution, whereas in other countries Twitter would just become a propaganda machine (isn't it one already?).
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas suggested extending common carrier legislation to cover social media platforms. That would essentially prevent them from censoring any content legal in the US.
Thanks for the link, I remember hearing about Clarence Thomas' take on this subject but I never took the time to study it. My personal opinion (before reading the material above) is that the "core issue" stands on the S230 "loop-hole" (I don't want to use the term 'abuse' given the negative connotation ... so far it[S230] has been a net good since it made the internet grow so much since 2007, but things have started to change with the rise of monopolistic corporations) giving companies both privileges with less responsibility than should necessary. At least in principle a Bill of Rights should exist, especially considering that places like Twitter are considered fairly often under the law (think court cases) 'public spaces'. Therefore in my mind if the public street is a place where i can speak freely, so should one be able to on Twitter/any other such deemed public space.
