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Comment by khawkins | Hacker News Reader

The mere act of making a message accessible from an internet connection is only 1% of what "publishing" is, and it's the only reason Google, Facebook, and Twitter make billions. Otherwise, the whole Geocities-type model where everyone has their own private website would be successful today.

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.

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Wasn't this even MORE the case before things like Twitter and Facebook?

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.

You're suggesting that the message you just typed out has the same weight as printing a few thousand copies of a manifesto for someone and shipping that book across the country to be put in bookstores and eat the cost if it doesn't sell. In no reasonable way does the "book publisher model" resemble the "social media model".

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.

Sure, but Twitter conversations DO disturb other people.

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.

First of all, we're not even talking about the censoring of terrorists, dictators, and extremist groups, which Twitter actually has allowed to persist on the platform in the past (e.g. Nicolas Maduro and ISIL). The current censorship at hand is a mainstream news outlet being blocked from releasing a damaging political story less than 2 weeks before the election. This is banana republic-type corruption.

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?

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