Would you support the same idea around electrical power? If the power company providing the power to the office at the NyPost decided that they had a political disagreement with them, would it be okay to just cut off their power?
NyPost could just make their own power, of course, by purchasing a generator.
For those who argue that Twitter is a de facto common platform, well these decisions are moving them away from that role. The more they exercise their own prerogatives in removing content, the more they're no longer some sort of vital communication platform.
But that actually doesn't even damage the argument: would it be okay if Google decided that they didn't like NyPost's politics, so they disabled the functionality of all of their nest thermostats? What if they used smart locks on their office: could they just disable the "unlock" function on the doors?
Would anybody be supporting this?
But, going back to my previous comment, it would in a way be a good thing if Google started capriciously "disappearing" sites like this, in a high-profile manner. It would accelerate the move to other search providers and bring a more diversified Internet to us all. (I'm not advocating for it, but the end result would probably be better than what we have now: SEO madness all to please The One Algorithm.)
Twitter has competition. Reddit, Facebook, Apple News, and traditional media outlets all disseminate information. They all offer notifications on your phone. Where we're typing this out is HN, which is another news dissemination and discussion service.
The more Twitter does things to make it clear it's not a neutral platform, the more other services can find users. I do not want Twitter to be a monopoly platform. Tagging them with some common-carrier-like status, while allowing them to remain private, just entrenches that monopoly.
But, because they have a monopoly in search, they can abuse it to dictate terms in other sectors. That’s what I have a problem with.
It’s also a story we’ve seen recently, where some poor user gets their Google Cloud acct locked, and loses their YouTube videos as a result. Those stories are what convinced me that Google needs to be chopped up.
Just because these companies engage in fancy accounting doesn't mean we aren't consumers in a traditional sense and doesn't mean we waive rights consumers typically are given.
It's all of these, except private. It's a privately run notification/messaging/authentication/identity/verification service. Just one that is widely used. That doesn't make it "public".
The corporation providing the service doesn't matter, it's the how the service itself is used by the public. And social media is now at the same level as phones and internet.
Yep, and they can also terminate your service for any reason they choose.
22% of americans have had a twitter account: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...
Social media is fundamentally different from ISPs and other utilities- there are some protections and restrictions under section 230 (for now) but number of customers does not a utility make.
Okay. That doesn't mean a whole lot at the moment.
The ISPs that allow you to even access Twitter at all are quite deliberately not regulated to this extent, so there's a lot of work to do before we can say that Twitter, of all things, is somehow a public utility without First Amendment rights.
Even if we agree that they are the right comparators, there's a problem for using that pair as a reference for how online service providers should be treated, since phone providers have a strong neutrality mandate and ISPs have none, so it basically provides no guidance whatsoever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
The barrier to creating a new social network once network effects have locked in a few major players is enormous.
In this situation, the market is more efficient when the large incumbents are granted a highly-regulated monopoly status.
That's how power companies work. You don't have new power grids cropping up, but the main providers are held to much stricter standards that a normal private company in terms of their quality of service and how much they can charge.
If we allow mass-scale social media to continue existing, we need these sorts of strict regulatory standards. These companies have become mad with power, and there's no way to unseat them through ordinary competition.
A natural monopoly is one that arises due to the high costs of entering the market and other barriers to entry that make it difficult for competitors to establish a footing.
Utilities are natural monopolies because it is very expensive to place pipes, transmission lines, etc., over large geographic areas. Consequently, a company must either have large starting capital or the ability to grab a large enough portion of the market to pay for the costs of the initial infrastructure outlay.
The barrier to entry for the short form messaging market? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Any programmer can recreate the functional parts of Twitter in under a day, scaling aside. And there are already several Twitter competitors. They're simply not very popular because they're difficult to use.
I wholeheartedly disagree that the cost is "nothing, nada, zilch". The network effects of having everybody using a couple of sites is what makes the cost of switching high, not the technical triviality of creating a new website.
The cost of entering the mass-scale social media market is basically zero, since you can do that in a day with minimal cost other than a domain name and a server (or VPS or AWS/Azure account or similar), and you can scale your costs as you grow, but your costs don't grow as fast as your customer base.
A natural monopoly's costs start high, and just scales from there. It costs tens of millions for a utility just to enter a small market, and with utilities, growing may actually increase their costs (see, for example, power and water utilities).
>The barrier to creating a new social network once network effects have locked in a few major players is enormous.
So...that is what I said, that the barrier to entering the market is enormous.
I'm definitely dating myself here, but Livejournal, Blogger, Myspace, Frienster, DailyBooth, Friendfeed, Yikyak, Snap, Vine, were all once the dominant social media website before losing to new entrants.
Facebook was started in a college dorm room. Twitter launched as an employee's side project. Instagram began with two roommates sharing an apartment. WhatsApp began as one guy.
There’s no physical issue preventing competition like with power companies, but to a social media startup, getting enough users is a similarly hard challenge as constructing a new power grid.
And you’re not actually a social network until you reach some critical mass of users. The cost of entering the market is low as you point out, but that doesn’t imply that you can realistically compete. So I think it’s fair to call social networks a natural monopoly. Even if they don’t strictly fit the definition they’re still monopolies in practice.
So if I am not allowed to access twitter, or banned from the platform then I am being banned from participating in my local government
So if it not a public service, then public organizations (like police, fire, schools, etc) should be barred from using the service
They _run_ on public infrastructure, just like a store or restaurant. That should be available to all.
The usage and network effects by the public is what determines the ubiquity and utility of the platform.
Just because it's served by private entities doesn't change the fact that social media is very much on the verge of becoming public utility. Twitter's own CEO claims that social media is a human right.
In the old days, if you thought newspapers were biased you could publish your own and it would sit on the newstand next to the other ones. That's how we got NY Post and the Daily News in NYC, etc.
But imagine if one newspaper had 100x the readership of the second one. And if it'd be impossible to start a new one because of network effects. The editor of that newspaper would have outsized power to affect elections and it would be considered threat to democracy. That's the case with Twitter.
Either Twitter stays 100% neutral, or we'll need to anti-trust the heck out of it to make sure there are a few Twitters to compete with each other (and represent different views).
Great, then they should not be subject to section 230 protection, which protects them from liability from user-generated content. If they are a private publishing site, they should be entitled to all the privileges and responsibilities of such sites, as well established in the common law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nova_Scotia_attacks#Lack_...
It's completely possible to get almost the exact same information you get from Twitter elsewhere. Even in the link you provided, it says that they used Twitter as well as Facebook to broadcast their message.
Twitter is not a utility. It's one of many news aggregators and it's completely possible to live without it.
I have never used Twitter in any serious capacity.
There are plenty of ways to get all this information and thinking that Twitter is the de-facto place to get emergency life or death situation notifications is downright laughable.
As far as I can tell, I haven't gotten swept up by a tornado yet because I don't have Twitter to see severe storm alerts.
If your only source of news or alerts is a single service run by a corporation that isn't beholden to anyone but themselves, that's your problem.
> .. many questions were raised about why Nova Scotia failed to use Alert Ready, Canada's mandatory emergency population warning system, to warn the public about the attacks but instead chose to use social media platforms Twitter and Facebook to provide updates, RCMP officials said they had been dealing with an unfolding situation and details were being updated frequently. However, the areas affected had poor cellular Internet service and were mostly populated by seniors who might not have used social media. Relatives of the victims pointed out that the use of Alert Ready could have saved lives.
I stopped using FB 8 years ago because the attention-seeking design was making me depressed, always wanting to check was was going on.
If we say that Twitter and FB are the places to get information about official government policy then 1) we need to let minors under the age of 13 have Twitter account (not allowed under the current ToS), 2) we need to have some way to ensure that personal information is not sent outside the country (currently allowed in the current ToS) or sold in any form - basically, the same protections as if you were to go to a government-hosted site - and 3) we need some way so people can see only essential government information, without advertising or viewing other sources designed around "engagement".
I don't think Twitter wants to take on this role.
It's effectively a utility.
I'd say one could fashion a reasonable criterion based on extent of use by anybody + extent of use by organizations + extent of use by news media. Beyond some level, a platform is a utility (albeit not necessarily defined by law to be one).
Projects like IPFS and urbit are trying to change this but the FAANG economy of scale combined with the sheer user friendliness of centralized platforms makes me very bearish
Twitter is in no way even close to the only way to publish something. It is no where near as difficult to publish on a different platform than it is to generate your own power.
If an ISP was cutting off the NyPost, I would have issues with that. If they had their domain name seized, I would have an issue with that. If other ISPs blocked network routes to their site, I would have issues with that.
I don't have an issue with Twitter blocking them. It just isn't the same.
What an absurd statement to make on hacker news of all places, where every minor movement of tesla/solar city is reported as breaking news. Or in a world where more and more people are going "off grid" and making their own electricity.
The power company is the easiest/most convenient way to power my home. It is definitely not the only way to do it.
So maybe Twitter isn't quite a monopoly on its own, but the consolidation of control over information and data distribution into the hands of a very small number of organizations has worrying implications for how we think about censorship and freedom of speech.
This is like not seeing the difference between allowing anyone to drive on a public road verse forcing everyone to pick up all hitchhikers.
I just feel that the issue of blocking a particular site is tangental to the real issue of the power these companies have. I am much more worried about the way their algorithms work for choosing who sees what, but that is not a concern based on 'free speech'
Social media is the tool, and some uses are ok and some aren't. I am not 'showing my true color' when I condemn someone who uses a knife to murder someone, even though I praised a master chef's use of a knife to cut food just the day before.
The government telling me, the hypothetical Twitter CEO, that I am legally mandated to publish your tweet, be it actually misinformed or just plain unpopular, or face asset seizure and jail time as a consequnce -- that is an _actual_, real infringement on free speech.
It just turns out that a lot of those SV libertarian free speech absolutists were actually partisan authoritarian hacks that are now abusing the notion of free speech in the current online discourse, so that the government will step in and mandate publishing their particular flavor speech. The people arguing against Twitter having the ability to silence and ban accounts (for any reason) are arguing for a Propaganda-class of speech that must be repeated by all who have any influence.
If you had a video or book or article 30 years ago, you couldn't even distribute it yourself around the world without the partnership of a major media company. It is way easier now.
Did people consider this a danger to free speech in the 90s? I certainly don't remember it that way. No one was worried that you couldn't get a main stream publisher to publish your crackpot theories, or that no cable tv station would air your crazy rants. No, you were forced to self publish, and deal with the fact that your audience was a lot smaller than if you could get a major publisher/media company to publish your work.
The NyPost still has a website, and anyone can still go to see it. It is way more accessible than self-published work was 30 years ago.
The reason these technologies are successful is that 99% of "publishing" is getting messages to the eyeballs that want to see those messages. The essence of their monopoly is that everyone's content they want to see is on that particular platform, both political and apolitical. It is difficult to follow people who get excommunicated from platforms, and the whole reason anyone uses these platforms is to avoid this difficulty.
Were people making arguments that Simon and Schuster were wrong and censoring if they decided not to publish a book? There are a LOT of books that have been written that no 'major' publisher would touch.
Yeah, that means you have to go and publish the book yourself, and print your own copies. And it means that most bookstores probably won't carry your book, and you won't reach nearly the audience that you would if you had a major publisher.
No one argues that the publishers are wrong for doing that.
The "social media model" is far closer to discussions you would have in a coffee shop or at a dinner party. Starbucks doesn't need to listen in on your conversations and kick you out if they're not disturbing anyone else.
Starbucks absolutely has the right (and would exercise it) to kick a group of people out if they were, say, conducting a KKK meeting and talking so everyone in the Starbucks could hear them.
Secondly, Twitter primarily serves content to those people who want it. It's what their algorithms are trained to do. The argument that the New York Post's article is disturbing and thus should be removed is easily used to justify any amount of authoritarian social manipulation. After all, everyone's actions eventually affect me, so I should be able to control all aspects of how they think, right?
The funny (sad) thing is that these utilities are almost easier to work around Twitter in this case.
Power company cuts you off? Buy a generator, no big deal.
Town turns off your water. IBC totes are cheap.
Comcast terminates your account? Verizon is happy to pay you money and if they aren't where you are then you can suck it up and by satellite.
If your a media business and Twitter/Facebook won't let you advertise and breaks links to your content you're basically screwed. There are no real alternatives because that's wher your users are.
In case you don't know, FedEx or pretty much any delivery company are free to refuse shipping your parcels.
A cursory googling is enough to allow you to discover fedex's shipping guidelines.
And to make matters worse, this radical group doesn't even care if the information is available or not, they only care about spreading it as far and wide as it's conceivable and attack anyone that they deem reactionary, including social networks that flag posts as having unsubstantiated information.
The reality is they have massive market share. Keep in mind, Facebook and Twitter prevented the spread of this story via PRIVATE DIRECT MESSAGES!
Imagine if AT&T or Verizon started blocking texts because of their content. You can say, "Well don't use Messenger" and you need to realize, a lot of us don't have each other's phone numbers any more. For my international friends, I might only have a Messenger or Hangouts connection.
And this is where the rub comes into play. At what point is one of these platforms so big that they become a regular communication utility? If you were paying for the service, that's one thing, but in the case of Faceobook/Twitter, they make money from you in more abstract ways (adverts).
People can still go to NY Post directly, and because we have such good freedoms in the US, we can route around the censorship to some degree. But at some point, this also becomes election interference.
Politicians don't understand the Internet enough to get reforms right. (Remember Stevens and the series of tubes?). 230 Reforms would probably need:
a) Remove the algo Timeline entirely. Results should be the way they were in the old days: Reverse Chronological. (or baring that, inboxes with the default search order of names being alphabetical).
b) Don't block any direct messages unless it's clearly malware or illegal. (This can get super tricky. Look at the sad state of e-mail).
The real solution is to get people to use more diverse platforms, platforms people pay for (even $1/month) and that distribute/federate data rather than centralize it.
There are technological solutions around this. The problem is people and adoption.
Everyone here is arguing with the analogy and not with the thrust of OPs argument.
That is wildly, incomparably different than a single social media website.
This reminds me of the time I talked to an engineering manager and he told me twitter was the electricity the internet runs on. I thought that was ridiculous, but this is taking it to a new level, where twitter is equivalent to electricity.
With Twitter et al, their service is free and "you are the product", so.. they can ban you whenever with no recourse at all.
This is basically the NYPost crying because it wants free stuff with no strings attached.
I'm curious what exactly you think they could have done to not end up here. I'm not aware of Twitter even offering a paid service that they could use, and network effects mean that failing to publish on Twitter just means that fewer people will see your stuff.
Twitter doesn't have a paid service for users (it has paid access to their API, just in case somebody on this site still had doubts about what really is their core business), I was just making a (probably poorly phrased) example.
To the extent that the regulatory scheme fails, that is a problem when and where it happens. But I've never heard of a power company refusing to provide electricity to a customer due to political disagreements. At least not in the U.S.
And the equivocation of a tabloid to a utility company is just completely absurd...
Recognizing their freedom doesn’t insulate them from criticism. Freedom/regulatory regime != morality.
FWIW I'm fully supportive of company autonomy, and I also like expressing criticism when their actions don't line up with my values.