I don't use twitter and seem to learn what is said.
It is difficult to see what the problem is.
Also, I tend to think a lot of this has to do with avoiding wrongful death suits for not policing their platforms..
edit: formatting, don't post before coffee
Twitter literally didn’t exist 15 years ago. How can a lack of access to Twitter be an an infringement on free speech then?
Television literally didn't exist 100 years ago. How can a lack of access to television be an infringement of free speech then?
Written language literally didn't exist ~5000 years ago. How can a lack of access to written language be an infringement of free speech then?
So the 14% of households with school-aged children in the United States without internet access don't have free speech?
https://www.ntia.doc.gov/blog/2018/digital-divide-among-scho...
Yes, but not the ones you think. The FAANG companies are basically all illegal monopolies.
No one seems to be angry that Rubert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, gets to decide who is a host/anchor and who isn't, who is a guest that is interviewed and who isn't, who goes on air and who doesn't, etc.
If Fox New (and CNN, OANN, etc) get to decide who to broadcast or not, I'm not sure what's so special about Twitter as a platform deciding as well.
Arguing the contra: if Twitter "must" allow Trump, shouldn't Fox News "have to" allow (e.g.) Noam Chomsky to have his own show?
Twitter and facebook have been banning people all along, for all kinds of reasons.
I thought the precedent set for Trump was the high level of leeway given to a government leader compared to regular people. I think if he weren’t the President he would have had more tweets removed and been suspended earlier and more often.
It’s an alternative to Twitter but it got there by being more restrictive.
And you don't own your phone. You have 0 access to it, you can only do with it what the vendor allows you to. The market economy argument just doesn't hold in actual practice, despite its theoretical validity.
This ban was long overdue. Are some people more equal than others?
I may be downvoted here for this statement but that is just some site on the internet. I may be banned from Twitter that is also just another site. Actually was banned from r/Conservative, so what?
Facebook/Twitter are problems because many things, but banning someone for roaring the masses is not one of them.
And arguments like: 'But who is deciding what is hate speech?' seems to me just like fallacy here. Because we have concrete example of spreading misinformation and roaring people in order to undermine civic society. This has already led to violence. 'What if' is just taking away attention from what has already been done.
For social networks, the root of the problem is their quasi-monopoly status. We wouldn't accept Comcast deplatforming people.
It's a bad idea to set policy based on the worst examples. I can't see any harm in kicking Trump off twitter. He was basically begging for it. But should Trump's extreme actions be used to justify banning BLM protests because they sometimes turn violent? How about Hong Kong demonstrations? Didn't they storm a legislature? How about WSJ? They print people who believe in election fraud.
It's like using 9-11 to set all terrorism policy.
IMO--these actions should be an "emergency only" policy rather than Big Tech deciding it needs to police what we all hear and think. It's really not clear which its going to be.
A person of ordinary education would understand the Hollywood Blacklists of the 50's as censorship. It's a quintessential example of censorship.
To extent you want to redefine censorship as only government actions, there is a pretty plausible argument that elements of the US government pushed for this. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/19/angry-democrats-fa...
It might not be a coincidence that Big Tech waited until Trumps defeat looked certain to finally start censoring his posts in Oct 2020. They were probably afraid of what a Democratic DOJ would do. Democrats have blamed Trump's win on big tech for years.