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Comment by 50656E6973 | Hacker News Reader

Are you asserting Twitter can't influence elections?

He's saying they _can_. If you can make the case that foreign countries can influence elections via social media platforms, how much more then do the platforms themselves have influence?

>>[question] At what point does Twitter restricting world leader tweets become election interference and foreign policy interference

>[answer] Never.

While I agree with your logic, it doesn't seem like the person I was replying to does.

Not by restricting the posts of world leaders. Twitter is a private company offering a free service that comes without guarantees, even for world leaders.

That's a non-sequitur. The fact their service comes with no guarantees makes no difference whatsoever to the fact that they are in a position, by virtue of the size of their audience, to influence any subject anywhere in the world.

Maybe it's a non-sequitur if we're discussing your personal feelings, but the fact that twitter is a free service offered by a private company without guarantees means that twitter has no obligation to provide service. Just because some group of people decided to congregate on twitter doesn't mean that the fundemebtal nature of twitter transforms into something owned by the commons. If it was twitter's desire to ban all conservatives from the platform that would be their right, twitter owes nothing to the users, the amount of users on twitter is completely irrelevant (and an arbitrary statistic)

>Maybe it's a non-sequitur if we're discussing your personal feelings, but the fact that twitter is a free service offered by a private company without guarantees means that twitter has no obligation to provide service.

This is bizarre, another non-sequitur.

Just repeating "non-sequitur" is not an argument. If you have nothing else to add I'll just reiterate what I wrote above. It doesn't matter how popular twitter is, you don't have to use twitter and twitter isn't obligated to provide service for free.

Popularity matters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refusal_to_deal

> Though in general, each business may decide with whom they wish to deal, there are some situations when a refusal to deal may be considered an unlawful anti-competitive practice, if it prevents or reduces competition in a market.

So based on your own link, "refusal to deal" has nothing to do with this situation since stifiling the posts of world leaders is not anti-competitive, in fact, it creates a competitive opportunity for platforms that might offer better service to those users.

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