People are using the term “public town square” consequentially not based on if the forum is publicly owned. It is an analogy, that you still seem committed to i

People are using the term “public town square” consequentially not based on if the forum is publicly owned. It is an analogy, that you still seem committed to interpreting it in a way it is not useful, even after I explained why it is used and tried to remove the analogy as the crux of the argument. The degree of control a site like Twitter has over public discourse is unprecedented. You may not use it, but almost all of the people in the world who influence world events do, and are influenced by the decisions the employees at Twitter make in how they regulate the flow of speech through their platform. Your comparison to MySpace is a clearly deficient mental model - MySpace did not have the capacity to cut off a massive distribution channel to the president of the United States nor did they have the capacity to suppress stories in the media to a degree where they could influence elections. There is an endless array of arguments I could make to destroy the premise that something like MySpace was in the same universe of influence over events as something like Twitter. Scale matters, and the nature of how the platform is used matters. If I write a tweet and it goes viral, it can reach tens of millions of people, many of whom hold immense amounts of power and influence. This is a materially huge shift in the nature of public discourse. Liberalism takes as one of its core assumptions that society progresses through the free and fair exchange of ideas, allowing people to debate and change their minds. This organ of progress, public discourse, has evolved to now fundamentally include a small number of social media platforms that most people use to discuss current affairs among themselves and the powerful. That they may die one day is irrelevant: the power their employees wield presently over the shape of discourse and who can participate and how is far beyond what people should consider acceptable. Hopefully this helps, but you seem committed to a very shallow comprehension of the events going on around you and their importance to free society. Also, fwiw, I ran a BBS in the 90s and have run several online forums over the years.