Gonna have to roll my eyes pretty hard at this. These are privately owned servers, they can delete whatever content they want off of them, if you don't like it, you're totally free to host your own server and content.
You're obviously still seeing the world through this fanciful lens of Mom And Pop corporate libertarianism. But there's more to that story. The more power you pour into Mom and Pop, the less they resemble their usual run-of-the-mill town grocer, and the more they become The Town itself in their own right.
Corporations are graduating from companies and becoming as powerful or more powerful than many nations.
While you roll your eyes, many of us are seeing the greater trend of a world no longer run by countries and constitutions, but by companies and contracts. Worlds where you can't turn around without being faced once again with the company you think it's so easy to just "leave".
You say "get out".
It's oddly reminiscent of those saying "get out" to those who are upset that their party lost in a contentious political election.
Compare this with something like the ISPs, where consumers have to choose between one and often no alternative options in order to access internet services which are critical for participation in the economy. Unlike any individual ISP, If twitter disappeared overnight, it would have a minimal impact on the economy, society, or even the internet community in general, as most people would immediately shift over to one of the many alternatives like facebook, snapchat, or the explosion of competitors that would hit the scene or suddenly gain traction within days.
Twitter is not powerful, it is a popular messaging app where celebrities post publicly. The government isn't necessary here because consumers are not harmed by twitter sucking.
This statement is weirdly detached from reality. The value of a social network is the ability to connect to people. Unless you're, like, Oprah, you cannot unilaterally decree that everyone you follow and everyone who follows you is going to move to another social network. So yes, there is a huge thing stopping most Twitter users from moving to another platform.
This is kind of like saying, "There's nothing stopping you from eating sand." It's technically true, but eating sand will not yield the same results as eating food.
I think that statement is the one that is detached from reality; the reality where twitter is of negligible importance beyond shitposting with famous people.
> This is kind of like saying, "There's nothing stopping you from eating sand." It's technically true, but eating sand will not yield the same results as eating food.
You're comparing a choice between messaging apps with the choice between eating food (necessary to survive) and dirt, and I'm the one that is detached from reality? Nobody needs to use twitter. Let me repeat that again because it is the fundamental point that you and many others in this thread seem to be missing
Nobody needs to use twitter.
You won't die if you won't don't use it. You won't lose your job if you don't use it. You will still be able to communicate with your family, friends, and everyone you care to know online if you don't use it. There are tons of other social networking apps and websites out there. People use twitter because they like it. If the twitter userbase has a problem, they can start a trending hashtag or an internet petition or something else to get twitter to change its behavior, but twitter has no obligation to listen besides the obligation they have to corporate shareholders, because they provide their services for free and nothing prevents those users from moving to another platform.
How much value I personally assign to it is irrelevant. The bottom line is that it is not a necessity.
> You can't take one of the people I follow and substitute an arbitrary person and assume I'll get equal value. The people I follow are on Twitter, and are mostly not on "other social networking apps and websites out there.
Great. It sounds to me like you use twitter because you like to read posts from certain individuals who also prefer to post on twitter (and not some other site). Those people aren't forced to use twitter, and it isn't anything more than an inconvenience if YOU decided not to use twitter because YOU have objections to how twitter operates their core business. You want to use twitter because you want to stay up to date on "the people you follow". That is not a description of a dystopia. Being able to follow your favorite celebrities is not important (except to you personally).
Maybe we should get the government involved in regulating League of Legends balance changes since they have 100 million+ customers most of which actually spend money to use the service.
No matter how much value you derive from the specific individuals that compose your twitter feed, you are not entitled to any of it because you never entered into an agreement with twitter where you compensated them in exchange for certain guarantees, barring that or something illegal, the government has reason to get involved in what kind of content twitter choose to allow on their site, period.
Charge first leveled against the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the 17th century. Of course when push came to shove, they were nationalized by the government. But the trope has far outlasted any of the companies its been pointed at.
None of that changes the fact that twitter is still free to do whatever they want with their own code and servers, and you're free to do the same with yours.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business....
"In social networking, there is a huge advantage to have scale. You can find almost anyone on MySpace and the more time that has been invested in the site, the more locked in people are".
Social conformity is far more subtly persuasive than outright violence in this day and age.
"Choosing" to opt out of corporate ownership is equivalent to a de facto excommunication from society.
Not using twitter isn't an excommunication from society, that's absurd hyperbole that might be a sign you're living in a bubble. I don't use twitter, most people I know don't use it, I'm willing to bet most people on this forum don't use it, which is all totally anecdotal, but the effect size is massive.
Obviously not, which is why I said "opt[ing] out of corporate ownership" which includes but is not limited to Twitter, Facebook, Google, Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Microsoft, Apple, Elsevier, etc.
Twitter is an incredibly important communication medium; as an example, it almost certainly was instrumental in electing Trump to the presidency. Just because it's privately owned doesn't mean we should be content to have it run like a petty authoritarian regime.
(That being said, IMHO, this is truly shortsighted means to collect a couple of bucks today, and a good way to diminish the value of the network over the long term.)
Competition & the market is all well and good, but it's not a panacea. It's very easy to reach a "local minimum" where there are globally bad things happened that cannot be remedied by competition, because it's too expensive/hard/impossible for a competitor to come into existence.
Perhaps, but that's not an inherent property of twitter itself, it just happens that people are there now, but the same could be said about Digg 6 years ago, or myspace 12 years ago or ICQ 20 years ago, people move around the web as trends come and go. Maybe your competitor will be the next big one, but you're not entitled to a network effect just because you don't like twitter, and neither are you entitled to dictate twitter's prerogatives just because twitter happens to be popular as of April 2017.
I don't believe in the idea of "entitled to" or not "entitled to" as absolute moral truths. We come up with a set of rules as a society and entitlements come from those rules.
It's perfectly reasonable to imagine various combinations of rules and try to guess which combination will give us the society we like most.
One possible rule is "private companies should be able to do whatever they want under all circumstances," which is what you and several others seem to be arguing here. I'm sympathetic to that viewpoint in the small, but once corporate entities reach a certain scale and omnipresence, I think it ceases to be reasonable -- in the limit as a corporate entity grows large and powerful, it becomes a government. As it approaches that limit, it should be similarly constrained.
Let me give you an example that will probably make you agree with me. Let's say Twitter decides -- since, hey, it's a private entity and can do whatever it wants with its product -- to delete any accounts that some machine-learning algorithm has identified as belonging to racial group X.
Cool or nah?
There are also many more people online now than ever before, but nothing fundamental has changed.
> Many reporters basically live on Twitter; it's at the center our media world.
You mean they "use" twitter? So what? Real journalists are outside chasing down stories in the real world, not retweeting crap on twitter as literally anyone is capable of. If a journalist "basically lives on Twitter", they're a crap journalist. Feel free to paste a few twitter feeds from famous journalists and incredulously ask me "so is THIS person a crap journalist?". I'll maintain, if they're not a crap journalist, any work that has elevated them to the status of renowned journalist has absolutely nothing to do with twitter. As far as content goes, almost everyone agrees that twitter is crap, it just happens that a lot of famous people crap there as well.
> private companies should be able to do whatever they want under all circumstances," which is what you and several others seem to be arguing here.
I am not arguing anything even remotely close to this. I don't think private companies should be able to break the law, for example. What I'm arguing is that it is the prerogative of a private company to decide what they host and delete from the servers that they pay for and administer. The public is not paying twitter any money, nor are they forced to use twitter, nor is twitter even that important. Just because celebrities use twitter doesn't mean it's an important societal institution. I'll admit that twitter has had an important cultural impact because it is popular, but just because something is popular does not mean the government should regulate it. Once again, nobody needs or is forced to use twitter.
> as a corporate entity grows large and powerful, it becomes a government
I'm sorry but this is totally absurd. Twitter does not have the power to levy taxes or a standing army or literally any influence or authority over your life at all beyond what you give it. Twitter is a glorified messaging app that happens to be popular with celebrities. That's it. The technology isn't even special or unique besides the scaling concerns.
> Let's say Twitter decides -- since, hey, it's a private entity and can do whatever it wants with its product -- to delete any accounts that some machine-learning algorithm has identified as belonging to racial group X.
Is that "cool"? Nah, I think racism is uncool, and it would piss off a lot of twitter users and non-users (like myself), but hosting a racist website is not illegal, and I don't think it should be. At most you should be entitled to your money back, and since you didn't pay any, you're not entitled to anything.
You're never seen a breaking news story come out through twitter in a way that's not possible without instant social media?
> I am not arguing anything even remotely close to this. I don't think private companies should be able to break the law, for example.
Missing the point. This is a discussion about theoretically changing those laws.
> nobody needs or is forced to use twitter
I mean, nobody needs newspapers either. A lot of unnecessary things are very important.
> I'm sorry but this is totally absurd. Twitter does not have the power to levy taxes or a standing army or literally any influence or authority over your life at all beyond what you give it.
Look at walmart. They have half a trillion dollars of money flowing through them. In terms of GDP they would be the ~25th largest country in the world. You think that money doesn't have ridiculous amounts of power just because they don't have a standing army?
> At most you should be entitled to your money back
Imagine for a second that twitter grew to become as important as an ISP. Let's say 90% of the alexa top 10000 required a twitter login to use. Or getting cell phone coverage from a national company required a twitter login. Would you still say they're entitled to discriminate? Is there any threshold of impact on people's lives where you change your mind?
The same thing is possible via facebook or reddit or even yahoo.com which not only gets more traffic than twitter, but has a more homogenized front-page which would have a bigger impact on how many eyeballs see a story.
> I mean, nobody needs newspapers either. A lot of unnecessary things are very important.
And? Should the government force the newspaper to print or remove specific content (outside concerns with the law)? Now that sounds like a dystopia. If you don't like the content of the paper, you can call it a rag, pick up an alternative paper and move on with your day, that is like the quintessential example against your position.
> Look at walmart. They have half a trillion dollars of money flowing through them. In terms of GDP they would be the ~25th largest country in the world. You think that money doesn't have ridiculous amounts of power just because they don't have a standing army?
And? What's your point? Twitter has 2000 employees and can barley turn a profit, Walmart is the largest employer and the largest distributor of foodstuffs and textiles in the U.S. The differences are pretty obvious. Twitter is irrelevant in comparison to walmart.
> Imagine for a second that twitter grew to become as important as an ISP. Let's say 90% of the alexa top 10000 required a twitter login to use. Or getting cell phone coverage from a national company required a twitter login. Would you still say they're entitled to discriminate?
Well that extreme hypothetical is obviously completely different from reality where nobody needs to use twitter for anything. Literally nothing requires twitter, certainly not something as important as getting phone service or having access to literally ANY other website. Your contrived scenario is a great contrast to how irrelevant twitter actually is.
Having your posts deleted from a private forum is about as benign as it gets.