Twitter is being threatened because they are arbitrarily censoring people.
Twitter didn't even censor the president, they just added a link below some lies he posted. He's been breaking their TOS habitually for some time and rather than ban him as they would anyone else, they made a special public TOS-exception for "newsworthy" bigwig public figures like him in their rules. The president gets to tweet things that would get you, a non-president, quickly banned from Twitter.[1] He's explicitly whitelisted as exempt from Twitter's usual control over twitter.com.
Now, the federal government is going to actually censor Twitter on his order, simply because they had the audacity to amend information to tweets from an account that they declined to suspend out of courtesy despite it breaking their rules for years.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/01...
This is exactly why Twitter is an editor.
> the federal government is going to actually censor Twitter on his order
Wrong. They will instruct the FCC to treat Twitter like a newspaper.
If you remove section 230 protections for UGC from companies that "editorialize" under this definition, what will happen is that the only hosting companies that will remain in the wake of that are the ones large enough to be "too big to fail" (or friendly enough with the feds) like AWS and Azure and the existing social media giants.
That makes the point-and-click censorship situation much worse, because then the only places you can reliably host are already integrated with the angry despot's military for realtime censorship as we saw demonstrated for us in the case of Wikileaks, and ongoing across the world.
You do not want to live in that world. Already we have companies like Facebook disabling links in comments on Instagram to control the flow of information and attention. I don't want a web where all of our communications flow through 4 companies who can disappear our accounts and 100% of our private or public communications down the memory hole with no audit trail or legal recourse whatsoever.
If 4 companies control the internet, having the government restrain from censoring them doesn't fix the problem. What do you think we should do? I'm at a loss here.
Let's keep the context of this label around the post on mail in votes "would be a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of Ballots" in mind. This is attacking democratic constructs with goal of subverting it. There is no ideas to improve the very system that the current steward of our democracy should be owning .. just throwing mud to cement power.
Twitter has to try to provide context to these anti-Democratic government broadcasts or least it loses any notion of private free press. I.e it might as well be state run if it does not have the freedom to structrue the presentation of platform participation.
The US Postal Inspection Service (the mail has their own feds, did you know?) would take well beyond the window of the election results being declared if some criminal decided to take the same blatant measures to defraud an election by mail as they did to defraud the electronic voting systems the last election, which were fraught with actual issues of undefined electronic voting integrity (which, of course, fails unsafe, because you're not going to re-do an election when the numbers don't match). It's entirely plausible that the last US presidential election was stolen electronically and the perpetrators simply got away with it because computer security sucks.[1]
Ultimately, voting is a hard problem, and it's not really solved presently (in person, electronically, or by mail) from a technical/attack perspective. There are so many ways to straightforwardly attack the system right now if you're willing to risk a billion years in jail if you're detected, most of them related to the ways that electronic votes are collected[2] or the ways that votes are transmitted to central tabulation.[3] These systems fail unsafe, even when discrepancies are detected.
(My own personal theory about this is that if election results take too long to become "official", people will lose faith in the process itself, so getting to "done" is in general more important to most involved than getting to "perfectly accurate".)
Vote-by-mail has a different, but also still large and present, attack surface, especially if you (as above) are willing to do Big Deal Federal Crimes Involving The Postal Service to subvert it, which I believe is entirely on the table for the highest office in the land.
I don't care for the president or his tweets, but to call this one in particular anti-democratic might be a stretch, too. The US presidential elections simply are not secure in any meaningful way right now, and switching to mail won't fix (or worsen) that. (I know it's not a popular thing to point out that the US election security emperor has no clothes, but it's unfortunately true.)
It's not antidemocratic to say that it's fairly likely that elections have been, and will continue to be, successfully hacked. (The tweet in question is, of course, using the concept as a weapon to further a specific antidemocratic agenda, but that is another matter entirely.)
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/17/17582818/election-softwar...
[2]: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-voting-machine-...
[3]: https://time.com/4599886/detroit-voting-machine-failures-wer...
Finally,
> might as well be state run if it does not have the freedom to structrue the presentation of platform participation.
Totally with you on that one.