Who is Twitter? They own and operate Twitter, and are the final arbiters for what is allowed on Twitter.
Most jurisdictions have, for example, protections for renters. As in "the landlord cannot barge in at 2 a.m. and kick you out, even though the place is legally his/her".
This kind of legislation was motivated by an effort to protect weaker parties against capriciousness of stronger parties, even though the housing market is nowhere near to an oligopoly.
Now, a Star Chamber of Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Visa banning, e.g. a small business owner overnight will destroy his/her business without recourse and prevent it from getting on their feet again. In my opinion, this is even graver problem than a landlord kicking someone out at will.
The ironic thing about this situation is that Twitter exercising their own judgement on what can and cannot be hosted on their platform is actually a good thing for the demonstration of independence of social platforms from government control.
Trump's departure from office plus the riot was where the balance was tipped (ie Twitter's potential future income from Trump's controversies was no longer greater than the reputational cost in keeping him on the platform).
I think not. I just don't think we'll ever have functioning legal frameworks for that.
Basically: freedom of speech and expression will only apply to what you do with your mouth, in the street. "Speech at scale", such as social media, will simply not be able to be included in it.
That might seem like a pessimistic take, but I don't think it is. The alternative is democratically elected governments taking a greater role in social media, effectively claiming services to be part of the substrate of society (Twitter, Streets...). I don't like that idea either. The lesser evil seems like the first scenario: freedom of speech not including at scale.
What, you don't think they have copies along with an enormous number of other people?
Yes, copies of his tweets exist, although I am also not sure if they are legal. Iirc Twitter demands that downloaded Tweets are being deleted when they are being deleted on Twitter. Trump himself may have the rights to publish them, though.
It's no more effort than looking up something in a speech or a press conference.
They don't explicitly say what tweets are the actual reason for his termination.
I found an archive of Trump tweets. It consists of 50000 tweets. Finding tweets in there that somehow confirm the claims that he was calling for violence is more work than just a couple of minutes.
And getting all of them is as easy as getting a speech recording, if not easier.
> I found an archive of Trump tweets. It consists of 50000 tweets. Finding tweets in there that somehow confirm the claims that he was calling for violence is more work than just a couple of minutes.
The exact same thing happens if his twitter is unbanned and you go there for context. I'm not seeing the issue.