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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

Twitter acts as a public square in the sense that there's basically no one there and only a fraction of the people actually talking.

People - mostly 'media types' - give Twitter and outsized amount of importance. Significantly more people 'use twitter' by way of journalists taking tweets off platform and talking about them in news/other sites for whatever reason.

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Twitter has 217 million daily active users: https://www.omnicoreagency.com/twitter-statistics/

I can't think of any other open platform with that large of an audience.

As for its relevance, while it may not host a significant share of the world's population, it enables the userbase to converge on messages very quickly, to coordinate social and political action, which allows them to have an outsized influence on the world. Twitter users don't have to make up the majority of the world's population to be able to give movements the critical mass of supporters they need to succeed.

Is it a "public square", or is it a private club where a few influential people hang out?

A public squares doesn't imply an even distribution of influence. People are free to enter, and peruse the message of the speakers present, and speak themselves, and the result is typically a small proportion of participants amassing the greatest influence. What makes it public is that any one is allowed to speak, and hear the other speakers.

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