Tyranny rarely starts with take-all power grab. It's usually small, "common sense" little things, that establish the basis for more and more power grabs, until the framework is ready for the final strike. This is how it happened in Germany, this is how it happened more recently in Russia. One day you wake up and discover that one of those "extremists", "foreign agents" and "domestic terrorists" that you and everybody else agreed need to be suppressed for the common good - is you. How could that happen?!
If you feel that being kicked off social media is the same as the removal of your ability to engage in public discourse can you tell me what people did BEFORE social media?
Then I guess it's a good thing no one in the world lives like that...
The people they want to communicate with have all moved to social media.
Before the Internet, there were systems in place for public discourse. Most of them have been dismantled. In the 1970s or 1980s, you read or wrote letters to the editor (now nonexistent or ignored), subscribed to specialty publications (all moved to social media), attended physical meetings (now organized mostly over social media if they happen at all). You might even have literally gone down to the public square to see what people had posted or were saying there (but nobody's posting or speaking now, because nobody's listening, because they've all moved to social media).
If you build a new public square, and everybody abandons the old one, you don't get to forbid soapboxing in the new one because the old one is "still available".
... and formal "board meetings" and one-to-one communication are NOT what is meant by public discourse.
Society, generally speaking, functions by collective agreement. So as corporations begin to control the ways that collective agreement is reached, all the ways that corporations are different from real people (as opposed to being “legally people”) and different from the government begin to make the decades/centuries of legal mechanisms, built up to protect this crucial delicate and completely imperfect balance that underlies the functioning of society, begins to break down.
It’s like a corroding bridge. It’s still structurally sound… (a.k.a. “The system works”) … until it doesn’t. I have no idea what the breakdown will be, when it might be, or how it might unfold. I’m not a bridge inspector, or a structural engineer, but I know the bridge didn’t squeak or sway when it was built, and now it does, and that there’s lots of examples from history of how bridges like this eventually fall down when something important gives way.
In my experience physical letters are taken more seriously than ever. People receive so few of them it is a treat to even get a personal letter. Emails are often straightup ignored or lost in the fray and social media contacts are, at best, manned by an intern.
Most of the people I know are using social media less and less. Facebook is now only for "old people" and chat apps are becoming vastly more popular. Some of these chat apps have features of social media but are not at all in the same realm.
More things are meeting physically than before and I do not know of any meetings that are only organized on social media. Only one person complains that I am not on Facebook and that is because they are the ones always starting Facebook groups and meetings exclusive to Facebook. I still find out about all of these events when someone calls, texts, or sends me a message in a chat app. Most people use communication that is cross platform.
Social media platforms are PRIVATE forums. Public discourse is getting up on your soap box and speaking directly to people, or engaging city council meetings and various public boards, or talking to your representatives and communicating with various leaders via mail and email.
THAT is what public discourse is, and absolutely none of it is affected due to decisions by Facebook or Twitter or Tiktok.
You are conflating being seen with being public. They aren't remotely the same.
People forget: none of these services are direct connections between one person and their audience like the telephone or public square. There are always three distinct steps: 1. You send content to them, 2. They analyze/curate, and 3. They publish it (or not) to the recipient(s). If you want a direct connection unencumbered by a company, choose a medium that works by establishing direct TCP connections between users.