This is completely wrong. "Being heard" is being on FB and Twitter, as these platforms (1) are effectively public forums by nature of their massive, near-monopolistic reach, (2) claim protections of public forums, such as immunity from liability due to user-posted content, and (3) implicitly and explicitly portray themselves as public squares/forums[1].
The online equivalent to "having the right to walk away" is blocking someone on a platform. It's that simple.
Once a company has reached a monopolistic size, which describes FB and Twitter, then it either needs to be broken up, or treated like a utility/government service - this is exactly the argument that you see all the time about e.g. ISPs and Alphabet/Google - because there's no other morally excusable way to act. The first amendment was written to only apply to the government because that's the entity that's the most likely to (and most dangerous in) silence speech and discourse, not the only one.
You definitely would not be making these arguments if it were your ideological tribe that were being censored.
Bullshit. If I was a serious <whatever> I'd go run my own website.
People whinge about being censored but don't care enough to run a website? Nazis run their own websites. It's easier than ever to run a website.
Nobody is owed being on a private platform, and it's total bullshit to say that we should force companies to. It's not a "de facto public square" - it's an advertising platform, first and foremost.
So @Jack said it was a public square - in the context of the ideal. Did he make that statement to a court? Because I'll bet being deposed, he'd say that was flowery talk.
> People whinge about being censored but don't care enough to run a website?
People talking about "whinging" usually do so because they can't come up with a logical counter-argument. That pattern holds true here.
> Nobody is owed being on a private platform, and it's total bullshit to say that we should force companies to.
If a private platform holds a near-monopoly on speech online, and actively uses anti-competitive behavior to hold people on their platform (as Facebook does, at least) - yes, individuals are owed the right to be present on that platform, because (as stated repeatedly before) it's a monopoly. Facebook is one of the largest sites in the world and enjoys the network effects of being the largest social media site in the world, as well as the lens through which millions of people perceive the world around them, and does its best to keep people there through a variety of anti-competitive strategies - if, at that scale, they decide that they want to ban people for non-illegal content, then the only sane thing to do is to break them up so that they no longer have a monopoly position, which is clearly not happening.
> It's not a "de facto public square"
It is. It has the properties of a public square, namely public visibility, generally available access to the population, a design that allows for and encourages conversation between individuals, and a design meant to emulate a public forum for discussion. Even though it's not legally a public square, it's a de-facto one because it has all of the properties of one and is treated as one - that's what "de-facto" means.
> it's an advertising platform, first and foremost.
Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. Ultra-scale social media platforms have the properties of both advertising platforms and public fora. You don't like the classification of the latter? Well, it's going to remain one until it's broken up or changes its behavior or suddenly loses users.
> So @Jack said it was a public square - in the context of the ideal. Did he make that statement to a court? Because I'll bet being deposed, he'd say that was flowery talk.
You're intentionally being obtuse. Of course the CEO of Twitter wouldn't stand behind his claim in court - but only because that'd be disadvantageous to him (in any court case likely to come up in the next several years), not because he didn't mean it. Nothing you said has any bearing on the fact that he said that it was a public square and meant it. You can't explain this away - it literally came from the CEO, the strategic lead for the company. If he says that Twitter is like a public square, that means that he's directing the company to that effect.
The online equivalent to "having the right to walk away" is blocking someone on a platform. It's that simple.
Once a company has reached a monopolistic size, which describes FB and Twitter, then it either needs to be broken up, or treated like a utility/government service - this is exactly the argument that you see all the time about e.g. ISPs and Alphabet/Google - because there's no other morally excusable way to act. The first amendment was written to only apply to the government because that's the entity that's the most likely to (and most dangerous in) silence speech and discourse, not the only one.
You definitely would not be making these arguments if it were your ideological tribe that were being censored.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28456794