To you and the OP's point, if I am understanding where you are going with this, Twitter previously had a right to remove people it didn't like, as they should. That seems fine. Although there is no obligation to provide any reasoning, I think it would have been better for Twitter to just say "yes, if you are ____ please don't come on here". I don't think it would have even had any consequences. It's not even weird given how social media sites tend to self segregate. Instead we got lectures about policies and disinformation and algorithms and moderation teams. Why not just make explicit rules?
Because the point was to shape public discourse and opinion. Explicitly stating a bias that has been coded into the system somewhat defeats the purpose
Musk already made it clear that he's not an absolutist, but picks and chooses what he wants to allow.
Most prominently, his public justification for keeping Alex Jones off Twitter is that it's personal for him. Which is just fine with me mind you, but doesn't constitute any kind of "free speech enthusiasm".
I'm not sure how aware people (you) are, in general, about Twitter and other big tech (fb, ggle) accommodating the government and political parties to amplify their messages and curtail the distribution of certain other messages.
I really don't know if that's something you or others might know about or consider deleterious to the operation of a free nation. You might be a proponent of those messages and opposed to the messages that previously had been systematically removed from the platform.
The problem is that allowing these things to occur will ultimately be bad for you as well..
Musk is as much free speech enthusiast as he is astronaut. He is systematically and notoriously punishing any speech he does not like. He did that pretty much anywhere he had power.
§ 230 allows platforms (and individual users with moderation tools provided by platforns)
to exercise active moderation based on their own view of standards; in fact, allowing that without it invoking liability as a publisher for the platform or moderating users in order to encourage and protect active private moderation is the whole purpose for which § 230 was included in one of the most sweeping internet censorship laws the US ever passed (most of which, other than § 230, related to government censorship and was struck down for violating the First Amendment.)
§ 230 does not require neutrality, and such a requirement would defeat its purpose.
You are being deliberately obtuse. No matter how one answers your question, most internet users still have unaccountable 3rd parties opaquely choosing who they communicate with [1].
Do you admit this is a problem, but you just don't see a solution compatible with the 1st amendment's freedom of association? Do you support the Civil Rights Act's restriction of freedom based on race and/or think it is constitutionally valid? Why would the same logic not hold for restricting companies such as Twitter then?
[1] Spare me rebuttals of "if they really wanted to communicate, they could do so by carrier pigeon!" - 99% of users won't go through with such effort, or even know who they are being herded away from. The remaining motivated 1% is too small to have any political power, and so the censor wins.
> Do you support the Civil Rights Act's restriction of freedom based on race and/or think it is constitutionally valid?
Sure, just as common carrier regulation is constitutionally valid. The Constitution isn't a suicide pact; the Founding Fathers very clearly did not intend it to be one. We've accepted a non-literal wording of the First and other amendments since the beginning.
> Why would the same logic not hold for restricting companies such as Twitter then?
Because being kicked off Twitter is hardly the same as not being able to dial 911 or purchase critical services. We've passed laws to correct specific, significant harms that are nothing like being unable to tweet. We weighed First Amendment rights against the rights of those being harmed in these situations and had to decide which conflicting rights mattered more.
That same process happens here. Different situation, different consequences, different decision.
> Spare me rebuttals of "if they really wanted to communicate, they could do so by carrier pigeon!" - 99% of users won't go through with such effort, or even know who they are being herded away from.
> Because being kicked off Twitter is hardly the same as not being able to dial 911
The Civil Rights Act also prevents Twitter (or any company) from banning users based on protected characteristics (e.g. race and sex). It is not remotely limited to critical services or common carriers.
We view certain companies that provide essential services as “common carriers” — who aren’t allowed to discriminate based on how you use their product. Common carrier status for essential services is one of the ways we protect freedoms in the US.
Examples: power company, phone company, ISP.
People are starting to view Twitter et al as similar to phone companies — and hence think they should be bound by common carrier rules.
Sure. US law, particularly Section 230, makes it very clear that social networks are not common carriers. Section 230 indemnifies them for liability when moderating material that is "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected".
These actions that would be explicitly forbidden for a common carrier to perform; as such, we can pretty conclusively state Congress never intended to apply common carrier status to places like Twitter.
Right — I said “should” to explain why people socially expect that they should be treated that way.
I didn’t say the current law was that way. Twitter didn’t exist (nor did social networks) when they law you’re citing was written - so it’s quite possible Congress didn’t contemplate this case or express any intent at all.
That would be a good reason to change the law:
If the way it is written doesn’t match how it should apply because the case in question wasn’t contemplated at the time.
Twitter doesn't have monopoly power like phone companies or railroads tend to, nor are the consequences as impactful. There's zero impact on your ability to publish your personal free speech from being kicked off Twitter.
Most people in the world don't have Twitter accounts and get along perfectly fine. You need phone service to apply for most jobs, contact government emergency services, go to school. It's a far more essential service.
Although the definition of a common carrier isn't necessarily that it is essential anyway. It's that it is offered explicitly as being available to the general public, not involving any sort of individual contacts between carrier and users. Everybody gets exactly the same deal. In that sense, Twitter arguably qualifies, but being a common carrier doesn't mean you can't ban people. Taxis and airlines are common carriers and can absolutely ban you if you don't follow their rules.
I think there’s lots of good reasons to consider Twitter and similar as common carriers:
The presidents and major politicians of many nations communicate via Twitter.
Major businesses, eg Gooogle and its subsidiary YouTube, only respond to customer service via Twitter, eg improper account bans.
There are some businesses, eg YouTube content creators, who you can only contact through Twitter; and some businesses, eg news agencies, which primarily source their content from Twitter.
- - - - -
> Everybody gets exactly the same deal. In that sense, Twitter arguably qualifies, but being a common carrier doesn't mean you can't ban people. Taxis and airlines are common carriers and can absolutely ban you if you don't follow their rules.
The difference comes when Twitter bans the NY Post from receiving the same treatment because they posted a true story that was politically inconvenient for Twitter leadership during an election.
There is more to it than a common carrier can “ban you for not following their rules”. Common carriers have limits on their rules:
A taxi service can’t refuse to take you to a political rally because they don’t like your politics; nor a phone company disconnect you because they don’t like what you’re saying.
Sure, the issue is that every time a political partisan or politically partisan organization gets banned from a service, they and their followers will always believe it's because of the party they're a member of, and not because they were being an asshole. It acts as cover to engage in any kind of behavior at all, as long as you're a partisan. That isn't what those protections were meant for.
Rules are enforced by imperfect detectors of infractions because there is no such thing as a perfect detector. No matter how careful a review process is, failures will always happen. Innocent people are convicted by real courts through decades of appeals in spite of all the due process. You will always be able to find some instances where a member of party A does exactly the same thing as a member of party B, but only one of them gets punished. Does this mean we should try the best we can and accept that we will fail a non-zero number of times, or should we never have rules instead because that's the only possible way to be fair?
I'm going to be perfectly honest here. I don't follow Twitter at all. I've never had an account. I haven't read an article from the NY Post that I can remember in probably 20 years. I don't actually care about this stuff and think it's silly internet drama that should not be dominating national headlines. So it's entirely possible Twitter really was biased here. I don't know. Organizations are not never in the wrong. When black people were banned from every lunch counter in 15 states, it wasn't an innocent mistake by organizations trying their best to exercise their right to freedom of association. When communists were purged from Hollywood, they were definitely targeted because of their party, not because they'd explicitly done anything.
But without stooping to the specifics of whether one single incident was right or wrong, I would like to agree that it is okay for a service like Twitter to have terms of service and remove content and block accounts that breech those terms. Legally, at least right now, they are not treated as a common carrier, but if that ever changes, one of those terms of service can't be "no Republicans," but that also doesn't mean no Republicans can ever be banned. If you think you can prove disparate impact in a court of law, have at it, but just be aware that you're in the ample company of every political partisan ever who believed themselves to be some unjustly persecuted minority being suppressed for just telling the truth. The fact that some small number really were doesn't do much to impact the overall probability distribution of holding that belief.
