You are free to complain, criticise them, scream at these companies or protest, but like I have said many times before they will not change and it is futile to believe that they ever will as long as they 'moderate' or do whatever they want to do on their own platforms.
So unsurprising this is.
I've been hearing this a lot lately, surprisingly from people who consider themselves to be politically left. I say surprisingly because historically, leftist ideology has been quick to solve problems with corporate behavior with regulations, whereas traditionally it's been the right pushing laissez-faire.
In any case, guys - private company doesn't mean your behaviors and policies aren't constrained. There are innumerable laws that regulate corporate behavior and these can be expanded at any time. Corporate behavior can be constrained without limitation if the public so chooses.
On this web site when I hear people talking about controlling what social media platforms do via regulation, most of the time it seems to me like passing a law where the government says the following journalists must have articles each week on the New York Times front page. (And none of them are actually going to be journalists so much as "journalists")
Other people see it more like passing a law saying the telephone company can't block your telephone access.
I guess my point is framing every discussion of social media as "regulation good or bad" isn't very useful.
Firstly, there is only one front page of each edition of the NYT, and the page has a very limited data/readability capacity. On Twitter, every user's page is a front page if you want it to be (although admittedly the recommendation of people/tweets by "the algorithm" starts to feel like an editorial decision, which invites further scrutiny).
More significantly, though, once an organization has built a social or telephone network, it is actually more expensive to disconnect or delete messages based on the opinions contained within them than it is to just allow them to continue moving between users. This is in contrast to the (physical) NYT, where editors necessarily have to whitelist every piece of content, and forcing articles past that whitelist has significant cost implications (even if no one reads them).
If you want to have full control over your property then do not incorporate and give the property to the corporate person. I can block links to mastadon on my truly private (ie, owned by a human person) website without consequence. "Private" corporate persons have more regulatory burdens for obvious reasons.
That's exactly what's going on right now
Not yet. Twitter is still a publicly owned company.
Of course it's not the first time. That's precisely why I'm making a big deal out of it, because I've seen it over and over. I'm suggesting that there's a kind of unwarranted ideology behind the usage that doesn't accurately reflect the legal reality, and gives the impression that companies have unlimited rights when in fact they're strictly regulated in countless ways. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31609113
We could talk about Section 230, for example, which is obviously important with regard to Twitter and whether it can operate.
It feels to me like people are "working overtime" to handwave about "government owned companies", of which nobody has given any examples. Nor have they explained why a government owned company wouldn't have the right to block any links that the government wanted to block. If anything, a government owned company would probably be treated as exempt from some rules that apply to "private" companies.
> Nor have they explained why a government owned company wouldn't have the right to block any links that the government wanted to block.
It's the First Amendment. The USPS can't refuse to deliver a postcard because they don't like what it says, for example. If the government ran a user-generated content platform (which they shouldn't, and probably never will) they would be bound by the same requirements.
Not sure why you mention this when everyone in the comments here insists that publicly-traded and privately-held companies are both included under "private company" in this discussion.
> The USPS can't refuse to deliver a postcard because they don't like what it says, for example.
Well, it actually must refuse if the receiver doesn't like it what it says. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_v._United_States_Post_Of... "the sender does not have a constitutional right to send unwanted material into someone's home"
How is the difference relevant? Also, the USPS can refuse to deliver child porn. Indeed, Twitter itself must remove child porn.
> why are you doing this?
I think that "theoretical government run social network" is a total red herring. Everyone in the comments is trying to tell me that "private company" is somehow a useful phrase to distinguish from "government run company", and I think the phrase and the distinction is doing zero work. I'm just following along with the game and trying to explain that the government/non-government distinction doesn't even help the argument.
The fact that Twitter is not run by the government is irrelevant, and saying that it's a "private company" doesn't magically exempt it from government regulation that may affect what it can and can't do.
It's kind of funny, when a big corporation does something terrible, half of the time the defense is "a private company can do whatever it wants", and the other half of the time the defense is "the lawyers made them do it", which is the exact opposite and contradictory idea.
True. My original reply in this thread was to the user "rvz". Then you replied to my reply.
“There are two commonly understood ways in which a company is considered public: first, the company’s securities trade on public markets; and second, the company discloses certain business and financial information regularly to the public.
In general, we use the term to refer to a company that has public reporting obligations.”
https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...