Jack Dorsey: Twitter has no influence over elections

Where it comes from isn't the same thing as what it is.

Doesn't add up.

And frankly, I'm not taking a political side as much as I am pointing out their actions don't add up either way.

Earlier on, competition was robust.

Today however...

We are at a point where the big players overlap with the public interest.

There needs to be a protected public square, and it needs to be relevant.

The private houses garnered the public trust and are leveraging it for money. I am not speaking to that other than the public appears to find that equitable.

Now, these moves to censor and manage the political dialog have broken that trust, and with that goes the loss of perception of equity, or value. That could be a very costly and litigious change of opinion.

And here we are today, beginning to see that change play out.

Frankly, being a product vs a platform is a part of that discussion.

Partisan politics is another concern. People are talking about how say, FB aligns with the right, Twitter with the left, and so on.

I submit that won't work and either we make it work and honor the Constitution and the idea of free speech, or we lose that idea and or see growing conflict that adds value to no one.

Likewise if you did a UBI-like mechanism where everyone was allocated $100/year for digital services like Twitter/Facebook that would flood the market with revenue, non-manipulative ad based revenue too, and many more startups could survive and do R&D, etc. to help break up the monopoly which primarily exists through economies of scale - if people have $100/year though (or whatever amount is figured out to be minimum viable) then there's excess/buffer funds to cover higher bandwidth and computing costs of smaller competitors who can't compete on scale metrics.

There are likely additional options than these above, options other than taking away the sovereignty of official individuals/companies - which is a very dangerous path towards implementing mechanisms useful for tyranny - sovereignty being the diversification and de-risking counter mechanism to tyranny, allowing individuals to "vote" by which service(s) they decide to use.

The $100/year for digital services is mimicking the Democracy Dollars $100/year voucher policy idea of Andrew Yang, allowing all eligible voters to give $100/year to their candidate of choice, which will washout for-profit industrial complex lobbyist money 8:1 with money from citizens who will have far more diverse needs than lobbyists.

E.g. imagine how much innovation would occur on federated platforms like Mastodon if people had $100/year they could only allocate to such a service, and they didn't want to find Twitter or Facebook.

Otherwise to parrot your comment, in conclusion, it's even further "not as simple as that" - as in you need to design the system to counter tyranny as well, there needs to be balance maintained where freedom is what is outweighing control; and freedom will cost more than control - it's quality over quantity (economies of scale), necessary cost is something we shouldn't be hypersensitive to or hypervigilant for, however most of us are due to the now artificial scarcity mindset most of us have, where mechanisms like $1000/month UBI will allow us as an organism to destress, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and focus on/care about the more holistic, less focused on self and survival of only self.