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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.

• nklop 5y ago
  I think that facebook etc are now public spaces. Weren't they granted some liability exemption? So they wouldn't get sued or something for a comment they only host on their platform? Edit: I appreciate the downvotes. This means that asking for clarification or even a basic opinion is seen as wrong. I won't repeat this mistake. Thanks for the feedback HN.
  • thrill 5y ago
    All such companies, large and small, were granted freedom to not be responsible for their users comments per US law. That doesn't mean they have to leave them there if they don't want to.
    • nklop 5y ago
      I've been downvoted to punish my comment. Stating an opinion is deemed offensive on HN. I'm out.b
  • kstrauser 5y ago
    I didn't downvote you. You were probably downvoted because I've seen this question posed a thousand times by people who weren't asking in good faith attempts to learn new things.
• Barrin92 5y ago
  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.