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.
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).
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
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.
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.