So there was a thread on Inside the 40 re: the new X and how it is much better than the old Twitter. Predictably it became political almost immediately. For some reason the mods decided to delete the thread rather than move it here to the Corral. Anyway, I had typed up a response to @LogDog55 but before I could post it the thread was deleted. So I'm posting the response here.
LodDog had agreed with another poster that Twitter was privately owned & could do what it wanted & that this did not raise any free speech issues:
Unlike a neighborhood bar, social media platforms are characterized by public engagement on a massive scale: in the case of Twitter / X, it operates on a scale of mass society. Unlike a bar, its operation has enormous public consequences. While Twitter is privately owned, like a bar, it wields enormous public power, unlike a bar. And whereas a bar owner is happy to maintain a modicum of order in his establishment--enough order to protect patrons & staff from abuse by local bullies--the ownership of social media platforms find themselves in position to influence, distort, and perhaps control the public discourse; to shape the minds of a coming generation; to establish the terms around which public policy debates will occur.
I do not contest the bar analogy on Constitutional grounds. But we have to recognize the kind of counteracting public force which is bound to emerge in situations where private interests come to wield enormous public power & when they choose to exercise public power in service to private political goals, goals which are not shared by the general public.
The Constitutionality of it is beside the point. Behind, below, or before the Constitution there remains the fundamental political substance which is natural to man as man and cannot be so easily erased.
LodDog had agreed with another poster that Twitter was privately owned & could do what it wanted & that this did not raise any free speech issues:
The bar analogy is fine if we think of it only from the standpoint of the private right of ownership. To the extent we limit ourselves to that frame of reference, what you say is true. It's true, but it's also incomplete. It skirts the following problem.
Unlike a neighborhood bar, social media platforms are characterized by public engagement on a massive scale: in the case of Twitter / X, it operates on a scale of mass society. Unlike a bar, its operation has enormous public consequences. While Twitter is privately owned, like a bar, it wields enormous public power, unlike a bar. And whereas a bar owner is happy to maintain a modicum of order in his establishment--enough order to protect patrons & staff from abuse by local bullies--the ownership of social media platforms find themselves in position to influence, distort, and perhaps control the public discourse; to shape the minds of a coming generation; to establish the terms around which public policy debates will occur.
I do not contest the bar analogy on Constitutional grounds. But we have to recognize the kind of counteracting public force which is bound to emerge in situations where private interests come to wield enormous public power & when they choose to exercise public power in service to private political goals, goals which are not shared by the general public.
The Constitutionality of it is beside the point. Behind, below, or before the Constitution there remains the fundamental political substance which is natural to man as man and cannot be so easily erased.
