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Comment by OzyM | Hacker News Reader

Do you have an answer for my political-platform question? I feel like that'd help me understand where you're drawing the line here.

As far as phone companies, my current understanding is that in the U.S., the government is involved in building and maintaining telecommunications infrastructure. Therefore it falls under the First Amendment.

If you run your own wires between a lot of houses to let people talk to each other, and then listen into every conversation and cut off ones you don't like, that doesn't seem illegal.

Things like Discord or Slack, for instance, should legally be able to moderate anything you send through them. Though it would be financial suicide to actually do so.

[Disclaimer here that I only have a vague understanding of telecommunications infrastructure]

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With things like Discord or Slack, they aren't a public venue, there's no public thread that's readily available with curated content.

Slack and Discord have self moderating. You can create your own discord or slack server and kick/ban whoever you want.

Reddit relies on self moderating your own sub-reddits. If it didn't then sub reddits like /r/sino prob wouldn't exist. But you have to go and search/find sub reddits or navigate from click-bait titles on the homepage.

This is unlike Twitter where it's all public, people you follow who like things are thrown in front of you, and all misinformation, propaganda, violence, insults, whatever is shoved down your throat, and the public cannot determine what should and should not be allowed on there, its up to a private company who is looking to 1) Profit, and 2) Protect its own agenda.

It would be nice if we had a balance of platforms, but unfortunately we have 1 for each medium. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, YouTube. Each of these have not 1 real competitor.

My line is pretty simple: if there's a clear purpose for the platform or even a part of it, then you have every right to remove content that deviates from that purpose. So I would say that your political platform should not be forced to host content supporting any other party. Of course it would still have to follow campaign finance laws and things like that, but that's a whole different ball of wax.

Social media platforms are content-neutral. They want to be treated like the "public square" because a lot of benefits come along with that. But then at the same time, they censor content that they disagree with. That's where it crosses the line. If Twitter came out tomorrow and declared that they are officially a left-wing social network and updated their rules to reflect that, then I'd have no problem with them kicking every Republican off the platform and banning every person who complained about taxes being too high. But Twitter won't do that.

I don't want to get further off on the tangent about telecommunications infrastructure, so I'll just leave that alone.

I disagree, in that I think any privately-owned platform that people voluntarily use, have easy alternatives to, and can leave without consequence has the right to moderate the content on their platform as they see fit.

That being said, after having a political/ideological group I really liked removed off a major platform (that it followed the ToS of) without analogous opposite-side groups being removed, I'm at least very sympathetic to your position. I thing we both agree that harmless differences of opinion shouldn't be removed, but I'll agree to disagree on whether the law should be involved.

> have easy alternatives to

Well that's always the million-dollar question, isn't it? Take Twitter for instance. Whether there's an easy alternative to Twitter depends entirely on your reference class.

The social aspect makes this so much harder as people are unique. It's completely reasonable for someone to need to be on the same platform as some other particular person. Say, Elon Musk. Or pre-ban Trump if you want the least convenient example from a civics perspective. How do you justify kicking someone off a platform for having the wrong views if that's where their elected representatives spend most of their time?

But this perspective completely defangs your position in all but principle. Any privately-owned platform with important[1] people using it is basically any platform that has any reasonable amount of success. Even if you restrict to public officials, well, there's a lot of public officials.

[1] Note important is in the eye of the user, and people will generally self-select into platforms that have users that are important to themselves.

I don't need a Twitter account to read people's tweets, and I contact my representatives through phone/mail. If they decide to spend time in a private platform not everyone will be able to message them on (or spend a lot of time in a restricted physical location that only lets people with "correct" opinions in), that's fine. If a politician wants a consistent way for everyone to be able to read their writing and contact them, there's nothing stopping them from just... Using their own website for that.

Just because some "famous" person uses a platform shouldn't mean the platform has to fall over itself to make sure their every word is hear and everyone can contact them.

In principle, sure. But in practice for many politicians, sending a letter will receive a copy-pasted reply while replying on twitter might get you a personal response. Similarly, getting kicked off Instagram will cause many businesses to die, despite there being another dozen sites where you can upload pictures. Social networks have an inherent tendency to monopolise niches, even if those niches are hard to articulate.

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