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If we really wanted this to be a 'public square', how would that combine with a commercial for-profit entity?

Unless the government (the people) buys it and funds it through taxes, it doesn't seem to be anywhere near the concept of a public square, just like a newspaper isn't a public square, and the commercial TV and Radio isn't a public square either. Neither are phones. Or billboards.

If something becomes ubiquitous enough to be regarded a public square, we either have to make it one, or fix the reason why a commercial for-profit company is regarded as public square in the first place.

There’s precedent for exactly that kind of relationship—commercial, for-profit, but legally restrained to do business with anyone without discrimination. It’s called a “common carrier”.

Although it was the FCC under Trump that, in 2017, removed common carrier status as a requirement for ISPs. Hard to make the case that ISPs are not common carriers but Twitter is.

> fix the reason why a commercial for-profit company is regarded as public square in the first place.

This would be ideal. The network effect is strong. As Barrin92's response to my comment stated, anyone can make an alternative site. But all of the value comes from the large networks of people on these sites.

I would prefer if such a "public square" site weren't for profit, if I'm going to be honest. Not sure how well that would work, but profit motives introduce too many flaws for such a necessary part of society. OTOH, so do influences from other means...

> I would prefer if such a "public square" site weren't for profit, if I'm going to be honest. Not sure how well that would work

Works perfectly fine. There are plenty of alt-platforms that are based on self-hosted principles like that (Mastodon, Pleroma, Matrix), and all of them are about the most "free" platforms (rather, protocols) you can find.

Yea, I do think protocols, not platforms, is the way to go. I especially like the way Mastodon works because you can allow/disallow federation of servers without actually being able to deplatform others

As a Mastodon admin, I wholeheartedly agree. I can decide not to connect to a given server, but I can't stop that server from existing. I think this is an excellent design.

The problem is no 'public square' can be defended adequately, particularly if everyone can access it.

Misrepresentation of the publics interest and voice will continue to occur. There is no solution that I'm aware of.

When you say misrepresentation of public interest, what do you mean by that?

I mean when news/politician/ect cherry picks specific and narrow online environments (usually astroturfed) to target or represent a larger group.

You're just describing Usenet, which still exists, and is still easily accessible, and has been around for decades on end. Honestly any action to crack down on social media for enforcing their terms of use for their own platform is a solution looking for a problem.

How can you exert your constitutional rights if the government allows companies to create/purchase/monopolize every avenue in which to express your rights? What if you had to pay a toll to utilize corporate paid sidewalks and roads? How could you protest the government? Likewise, the internet infrastructure we have today was created by the government, so it only make sense that the fundamental rights we have protected by the constitution be respected here as well.

I don't understand why many liberals defend a corporations freedom to silence speech but get angry when conservatives in the government do it. Six of one, half dozen of the other, it's still speech being silenced by someone more powerful than you. But one being a corporation and one being a politician doesn't change the fact that both limit freedom of speech protected by the constitution.

“ I don't understand why many liberals defend a corporations freedom to silence speech but get angry when conservatives in the government do it. ”

Because it’s a false equivalence that has nothing to do with being “liberal”.

The government has the power of coercion. No corporation has that by law.

In general, you are conflating the right to free speech with the privilege of easy armchair dissemination of one’s speech. Simply, your right to say anything doesn’t extend to forcing the world to disseminate and listen to what you have to say. Frankly, that extension is very much 1984.

In extremis, Trump has the means to publish a newsletter and nobody is stopping him from doing it.

If you have a right to bear arms, but no company in the country's sells a gun, do you have the "right" to bear arms?

The answer is: no you don't. Because the government enables these companies to do these things that enroach upon your rights while making people like you believe you still have said rights simply because it's not the government proper doing it. The government and through lobbying can influence and control a lot of what you do without legislation you know.

Every avenue? The right has Fox News, Newsmax, OANN, hundreds of local TV stations, and thousands of radio stations running conservative talk radio. They have no trouble getting their message out. On Facebook, most of the people with the highest engagement are right wing.

Maybe that is because the United States is more conservative than you assumed

You can't have it both ways: either you are being censored and silenced for your views, or you are not.

It is a scary proposition that an elite few media companies can control the voices that reach the public. Definitely room for abuse there. Not sure how best to address it for all parties concerned. Censorship at this point is just easier. Perhaps it always will be.

People can speak their mind, it's just that nobody else is obligated to host you speaking your mind.

The issue isn't Donald Trump being silenced, the issue is wannabe tinpot dictators like him trying to coerce private business into doing his bidding. That's the actual free speech issue if there is one. Nobody should be compelled to host anyone else's speech.

Social media sites are not 'de facto public squares' in any way. It's trivial technically to create an alternative site to the incumbents, that's why there's already like half a dozen alternatives spawning around Trump's political ecosystem. It's just that the content on those sites is so godawful within days of them going online that everyone runs for the hills who has a few brain-cells left.

It is so ridiculous to paint people like Trump, literal oligarchs, as victims of private business lol.

It’s in no way trivial to create an alternative site. What makes those social media platforms what they are is the network of people. That’s like saying if Ma Bell decided to kick someone off the telephone system in the 70s that they could just create an alternative network.

That’s without even talking about stuff like being kicked off app stores, AWS, other hosting, or even their domain name.

So in essence: Don't get too popular, because if you do, the government will restrict your ability to moderate the content you host.

It's not at all like ATT kicking everyone off the telephone system. If the ISPs providing the bandwidth kicked people off simply because they don't like what they say, then it would be similar, but these are software as a service organizations, and you are free to use that still available bandwidth to use a different service, or even make your own. The gold is in the size of the audience, and that's what these companies have built, and done so by setting guidelines and providing incentives to bring the users.

There's absolutely no right for you or anyone else to have a guaranteed audience, though plenty of politicians try to make it so by using taxpayer money to let you know they stole some money from one taxpayer and gave it to a larger voting bloc friendly to them.

So, yeah, it's a few days of work to build a twitter replacement, but if you want that audience, you have to put in the sweat to build it, not just jump up and down and demand that you have a right to one that someone else built.

Yep, that's why Instragram will never work, no one will ever steal user share from ICQ, and Myspace will be around forever.

If a quarter of the people on planet Earth using Facebook isn't enough, is there a threshold in which you WOULD call it a public square? Just curious.

No there is no threshold because Facebook is in no conceivable sense comparable to public land. The reason the public square is public is because it's not fungible, there's only one center of the town.

You can be on a dozen social networks, or on none, and hitting enter and going somewhere on the internet takes (almost) the same time regardless of where you go,in other words Facebook is trivially replaceable the same way it replaced MySpace, regardless of how large it is. The question is whether Facebook exercises market power, not whether it is large, which is the exact same flawed argument that people use in regards to Google.

What actually has public character is the physical infrastructure of the net, maybe the ISP level, but not digital products, at least none I have seen yet.