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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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