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Comment by Dudelander | Hacker News Reader

All privately owned business work with the government. Ownership of private property means that armed people who work for the government will enforce your claim. If no government employees are enforcing your claim, then you don't actually own the thing you think you own.

Businesses get favors from the government whenever they call the police or are involved in a lawsuit. They help the government when they pay taxes, and when they give information to the police. The BTK killer was busted because T-Mobile shared his information with the FBI. This was considered normal at the time, and is considered normal today.

None of this should be surprising to anyone. It's how capitalism works. If you don't like capitalism that's fine, but you shouldn't be surprised when the capitalist country you live in does capitalism.

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Ah my bad. I didn’t realize you understood my position better than I do. I’ll stop questioning things!

I get it - you're just asking questions! we cant trust anyone right?

Thanks, I had never heard the follow up excuse that comes after

"but Twitter is a private company, they can censor whomever they want"

"well actually they were getting paid to censor whatever the government told them to"

And a pivot to capitalism at the end too, nice

I think you're kind of playing dumb here, but I'll indulge.

Private companies can censor whomever they want, and that has been the case as long as the US has existed. I'd prefer it if Twitter was more consistent about it, but that's just my opinion.

The government never paid Twitter to censor anyone. The FBI paid Twitter 4 million as reimbursement for processing their information requests, and Twitter pushed back against a lot of those requests.

Companies getting paid by the government is absolutely how capitalism works. Lockheed Martin and Boeing get trillions of dollars of government money to build weapons. SpaceX gets paid to launch satellites. Tesla gets paid to make electric cars. Hell Elon wouldn't be the (second) richest man in the world if it wasn't for our tax dollars.

Nobody should be surprised by any of this. It's how our system has worked for over 250 years.

> "well actually they were getting paid to censor whatever the government told them to"

The government is paying Twitter to do work in the same way arduous FOIA requests have to pay the government for work. It's not like you can request millions of paper documents from the government without paying for it.

Is there any proof Twitter actually profited from these requests? It appears they are paying for the work itself. Twitter may have actually lost money if you add the total cost of employee compensation plus the cost of managing this whole infrastructure.

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