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Comment by Mirioron | Hacker News Reader

Even though Twitter and the like might be new technology, they are still replacing the old. People only have so much time in the day and all the other ways that people engage in politics compete with Twitter and the like. And it seems that Twitter and the like have won that competition. This means that a large chunk of political discourse now happens on services like Twitter.

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Yes, but why isn't Twitter allowed to curate political content? They have a 1st amendment right to do so. Just like every newspaper before them got the right to curate who got published in their editorial section.

There is a difference between a platform and a publisher. Publishers can curate, platforms aren't supposed to.

As I understand it, whether social media companies are platforms or publishers forms the actual core and substance of this debate about "free speech."

edit Apparently there is no legal distinction between a platform and a publisher? It looks like this article may explain the confusion that I myself had. => https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190613/03172142391/once-...

> As I understand it, whether social media companies are platforms or publishers forms the actual core and substance of this debate about "free speech."

This is wrong. There is no such distinction between platforms and publishers and the opposite is actually true. The law explicitly states that website owners are not responsible for content provided by other parties and are also explicitly permitted to curate their platforms for what they deem to be objectionable content.

I don't think people are arguing that what Twitter is doing is legal or illegal, but whether it's morally good or bad, and whether it will promote a better society. These are understandably much less tangible problems.

There's still no difference between "publisher" and "platform". I see Twitter as a giant expansion of the Op-Ed section of the newspaper, not a telephone party line.

To whom is Twitter responsible? If shareholders/investors then it should do whatever seems most likely to make it the most money. If "users" then it should do whatever seems most likely to make the most users happy.

There are valid moral arguments on both side of the censorship debate, and ultimately it comes down to subjective judgement and a gut call by twitter management. There's a lot of people claiming moral imperatives and "what is right" as if "right" was an absolute and not like, their opinion, man.

They are clearly both, just as newspapers were before them (heck they had classifieds and personals while I was alive, that's a platform). The editorial section of a newspaper is a platform, but a highly curated one, because of resource constraints that a platform like Twitter doesn't have.

>>Even though Twitter and the like might be new technology, they are still replacing the old.

Which "the old" specifically? What did my great grandfather use to directly contact the Henry Ford and get into a flame war with him about how his newfangled "horseless carriage" was killing his equestrian breeding business?

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