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> The US government did not create the land it claims as its territory, it took control of it by force killing thousands of people.

Yeah, that's true of every nation in existence and every nation in the past. We just happen to live in a relatively peaceful time. Not too long ago, constant war and fighting for territory was all there was, and there wasn't a square mile on planet earth that blood hasn't been spilt for.

Twitter is a monopoly and has an outsized influence on politics and news today, beyond any media force in history, perhaps. They're protected by arbitrary legislation from the 90s that prevents them from being held accountable for false or defamatory statements from getting published and shared on their platform.

The whole impetus from that protection was to promote free speech. Instead, Twitter has chosen to arbitrarily and selectively mute, shadow ban, lock out, and silence those who they disagree with. I think if they are benefitting from 230 protection, they should not be allowed to engage in this kind of manipulation. Or they should be forced to federate their service with other platforms.

With Twitter, individual contributors can spend a decade building up a following of tens of thousands to millions of users, and then with a click, Twitter can take that away. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when we got the right to keep your phone number passed so that you can keep your number when you switch cell phone carriers. That sort of thing does not exist in social media. If I switch platforms, I lose my ability to communicate with my connections. That's a problem. That should be legislated away.

At some point, the political leaders of the world are going to have to take a side. Either online social networks are publishers, or they are common carriers, or they are something else and that something needs to be defined with sufficient clarity for everyone to know where they stand and what their rights and responsibilities are.

If the social networks are to be considered publishers, they can properly be held accountable for the information they propagate. That has to remain true whether the information is blatantly untrue political propaganda and climate change denial and anti-vaccination conspiracy theories or child abuse images and calls for violent protest and revenge porn. But the services also have to have full editorial rights to go along with that responsibility, and if the biggest loudspeakers on the planet choose, for example, not to propagate someone's political speech during an election campaign because the operators of those services don't like the politicians, that's their right.

Alternatively, if the services are to be considered common carriers, we go to the other extreme. They aren't responsible for anything transmitted over their network, whether good or bad. They are a mere conduit for information, no different to a phone service or postal mail or the crazy guy shouting in the pub at the end of the night or the Internet itself for that matter. They have to be impartial, including passing on material they don't necessarily like or agree with, without interference or comment. But then the services shouldn't be forever accused of not doing enough to combat whatever this season's political Big Bad is, regardless of the cost or even technical practicality of doing something else about that issue. Censorship is not their responsibility, and enforcing laws against criminal behaviour online is still the responsibility of government through normal law enforcement agencies and judicial processes.

Those are the two classical models for big data shifters within most of our legal systems today, at least in the relatively democratic West. If governments want a third model instead, the politicians need to own the issue for once and actually say what they want so the tech firms can do it (or stop trading, or relocate to a more favourable environment, if what is demanded is too unreasonable or unrealistic). But of course then the frequent contradictions in political comment on these networks would be undermined and they could no longer be turned into the fall guys for everything bad that happens online so politicians who haven't managed to deal with difficult issues can save face.

I am no big fan of any of these social networks, and I do personally think that much stronger regulation of big tech firms is long overdue, for the benefit of all the ordinary people whose lives are affected by them. But I also believe in fairness and transparency, particularly when it comes to who is legally required to do what and who is legally responsible for what. It's really tiresome to see politicians who wouldn't know an encryption algorithm if you handed them a paper with the algorithm's name in inch-high letters on the cover trying to lecture representatives of businesses that, for all their many failings and problems, are at least doing something that some real people find useful.

> Yeah, that's true of every nation in existence and every nation in the past. We just happen to live in a relatively peaceful time. Not too long ago, constant war and fighting for territory was all there was, and there wasn't a square mile on planet earth that blood hasn't been spilt for.

Cruz is a part of the US government so my statement was about that government but it is of course applicable to all governments.

> Twitter is a monopoly and has an outsized influence on politics and news today, beyond any media force in history, perhaps.

No, Twitter is not a monopoly. Nobody is forced to use Twitter and nobody is prevented from competing with Twitter. The same is not true for the US government which Cruz is a part of.

> They're protected by arbitrary legislation from the 90s that prevents them from being held accountable for false or defamatory statements from getting published and shared on their platform.

Section 230 is no more arbitrary than any other legislation. It doesn't protect Twitter any more than it protects its competitors or anyone else who publishes contend uploaded by other people. Section 230 provides the same type of protection as the first or second amendment, protection from the government.

> The whole impetus from that protection was to promote free speech.

Then it has achieved its objective as it would be much more difficult for anyone (except maybe massive corporations) to publish user generated content without section 230.

> Instead, Twitter has chosen to arbitrarily and selectively mute, shadow ban, lock out, and silence those who they disagree with.

It's their servers. They have no obligation to host anything on them.

> I think if they are benefitting from 230 protection, they should not be allowed to engage in this kind of manipulation. Or they should be forced to federate their service with other platforms.

Force is not an appropriate response. Why don't you delete your Twitter account and setup an account with a competing service? Then you can advocate for other people to do the same thing voluntarily instead of advocating for force and coercion.

> With Twitter, individual contributors can spend a decade building up a following of tens of thousands to millions of users, and then with a click, Twitter can take that away.

You should never have used Twitter in the first place if that was a requirement. Twitter doesn't offer that security but mastodon does so you can use that instead. Other people don't have an obligation to cater to your preferences and it's wrong to force them to do that. Twitter does however allow you to pin a tweet with a link to your mastodon account so I suggest you do that if you still have a Twitter account.

> I mean, I'm old enough to remember when we got the right to keep your phone number passed so that you can keep your number when you switch cell phone carriers. That sort of thing does not exist in social media. If I switch platforms, I lose my ability to communicate with my connections. That's a problem. That should be legislated away.

No, force is not the answer to non-violent problems. Please explore peaceful and voluntary solutions to your problems before imposing your will on others.

> It doesn't protect Twitter any more than it protects its competitors or anyone else who publishes contend uploaded by other people.

That's technically true, but practically, I'm not so sure. Section 230 created the conditions for the high level of online centralization and corporate-driven censorship we see now.

> Force is not the answer to non-violent problems.

I agree with this in general, but the first use of legislative "force" was the Congressional decree that libel and slander arguments against internet platforms will not be entertained in American courts. Is it okay to "force" citizens to endure violations of their rights without legal recourse? Does the justification for applying this "force" still apply in 2020?

Yes, it's a monopoly. No one is forced to use electricity but people don't really have much of a choice when it comes to power providers. If you want to build an audience by micro blogging there is no other platform that comes close to Twitter's reach. They have almost the entire market.

Section 230 protects Twitter a great deal, in a way that neither Fox nor CNN nor any other news organization gets. When those organizations publish false information they can be sued. Twitter cannot thanks to 230. That's a huge advantage. And their meddling in free speech violates the impetus for the 230 legislation in the first place. If they are going to meddle, they don't deserve protection from liability.

If it's useless legislation in your opinion, let's just get rid of it and see what the lawyers do with Twitter. Is that fair, in your mind? It's fair in mine.

I've learned over the years that you can learn a lot about a person's true intentions regarding an issue by noting how they otherwise engage with the issue. In this example, Cruz is obviously angry about what editorial control was exercised rather than that it was exercised at all. Given that I haven't seen him railing at Rupert Murdoch or Sinclair for its creeping monopoly of local radio.

When's the last time an entire news cycle was influenced by what was said on local radio?

Sinclair's effect of influence is distributed rather than centralized. The two things are asymmetric but that does not mean they aren't both powerful.

Realistically speaking social media companies should be regulated as public utilities. That's just recognizing the fact that they are natural monopolies. Saying "delete your account, and practically ostracize yourself from public discourse into irrelevance" makes as much sense as saying "you don't like your water company? just use another one". Technically we could live in a society in which this is true, but in practice we don't.

I'm a big fan of public utilities but those things are light years apart.

Water 1 You must have clean water. 2 You cannot feasibly participate in some other water gathering project in your municipality. 3 Another water company cannot establish itself in your municipality

Social Media 1 You do not need social media, there are many healthy ways to stay connected to friends and family 2 You have many choices of social networks where you can spend your time 3 The longest lived major social networks is like 10 or 15 years old and we really don't have any idea how penetrable the market is long term.

>>Saying "delete your account, and practically ostracize yourself from public discourse into irrelevance"

You know there's this big big gigantic thing called the internet and it's so incredibly big you can make your very own website with your own name on it? If you're relevant to public discourse, people will obviously go to your personal website.

If not - maybe you're not so relevant as you thought.

That's a cop-out. If there is one thing we have learned from the current generation of dominant tech services, it's that network effects can be hugely powerful in this space. A business with a strong enough network effect supporting its main product or service can, evidently, screw up in almost any other respect and still survive with its network intact and its share price untroubled. And that remains true even if those screw-ups can have catastrophic effects on many little guys who were affected.

Is a commercial radio or broadcast television station a public utility as well?