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Moreover, few were willing to regard Twitter as a “de facto public square” when the cancel culture debates were raging. Then Twitter was merely a private compan
by throwaway894345 5y ago
Moreover, few were willing to regard Twitter as a “de facto public square” when the cancel culture debates were raging. Then Twitter was merely a private company exercising its rights to moderate its platform… which I sympathize with, but also there’s a functional reason to enforce free speech in the public square, and at a certain scale social media is the public square and it’s probably better to protect the rights of the many at the expense of the owner. I suspect if Musk buys Twitter it will reveal some hypocrisy on both sides (some “free-speech” people will advocate for Musk’s right to moderate as he sees fit and other “private platform” people will advocate against moderation).
Of course, whether or not social is “a public square” is not well-defined.
- hotpotamus 5y agoSo what rights to Twitter should the people have and what mechanism would be used to enforce those rights? Or has Twitter not reached the scale where you consider it the public square?
- throwaway894345 5y agoI don’t really know what to do with Twitter. I think it could be interesting to regulate social media networks such that they are required to speak some open protocol. Twitter is thus just one portal/view into an underlying network, and they can moderate it how they like but you could also switch to some other portal while continuing to interact with your Twitter contacts. Basically Twitter doesn’t own your content or your connections; you can take that with you if you leave Twitter. But that’s pretty radical; I don’t necessarily advocate it.