Yes, it is the world we live in, and have pretty much always lived in. Private companies have been deciding who gets "air time" ever since we had radio or TV. And with the printing press, it's always been private companies deciding who gets airtime.
Twitter itself presents itself to investors and users as communication network, not a publisher or media company. This is a direct quote from the very first paragraph of their 10K filing:
> Twitter shows every side of the story.
So, I'd say the better analogy isn't a news station or printing press. This is more like if Verizon decided to start censoring your phone calls.
Twitter places plenty of restrictions on acceptable speech on their platform, regularly bans accounts for bad behavior, and regularly gives timeouts to accounts. Even mere insults are enough to get a week long timeout on Twitter.
I don't think I've ever seen Verizon suspend an account because of insults by phone call. Doesn't seem the least bit similar.
I'm pretty sure public utilities don't get to deny service for political wrongthink, though. And platforms like Android play store and the iPhone app store are definitely that (regarding Parler).
Political wrongthink has nothing to do with this. It's about the incitement to violence, something that even the 1st amendment doesn't protect.
They're that way regarding pornography, or even App names that give the hint of promoting drug use (Amphetamine, recently). Pretty much everything that's not acceptable on the 10pm news is kept out of app stores.
And I think that is wrong. Why can't I use apps regarding pornography, or about drug abuse. Why is the internet more and more neutered into a place for polite children?
I'll tell you when I started to hate this trend. A few weeks ago I saw a rich company owner on Linkedin trashing the regulator, with conspiracy theories and personal insults. There were no downvotes (because Linkedin does not allow downer reactions) and all comments were neutral or supportive. It was clearly wrong and no one dared say the wrong thing on Linkedin, because everyone has jobs and are afraid to speak against the president of a very important company. For the first time it really felt like I was on a new internet, sure I could write some words, I could create a profile and follow different people, but I knew I couldn't be myself, I couldn't express any negative (read: against the currently approved trends) comments, I couldn't read the wrong things. I was just mindlessly consuming, consuming the silly and harmless memes, consuming the neutured and feel good news, made to feel what I was supposed to be feeling about the world events. It's all a big party in all social media as long as you dot inside the lines. Nothing was explicitly stopping me, but there was always the cloud that if I say the wrong thing I'll get deplatformed, or worse, someone might badmouth me on Twitter and I lose my job. And there is no real alternative, we are social animals and desire some interaction and discussion.
I remember when I was a kid I was on the internet reading about philosophy and how to make bombs side by side. Do you know Al-Qaeda published a monthly magazine in English for years? Do you even imagine being able to read it now? Are you not even curious? How did this world became so scared of reading different points of view, when were we convinced that people can't handle their curiosity and at the same time maintain democracies work because they are ruled by the people.
I think this is something that we in tech need to discuss a loooot more.
Decades ago, it seemed that there were far more people in tech that were in experimental communities that explored these power relations better. These days, we are all a lot more normie. Sure, some people still go to Burning Man, but when was the last true co-op member you knew in a tech company? It seems so less frequent these days. We should be the ones writing stuff like this:
In the US, a corporation, after four years of deliberation, finally got the "courage" (at least that's how I imagine it going internal to Twitter), to ban the account of the government's prime executive. This would never happen in a place like China, because President Xi holds ultimate power.
But why does anybody even care if Twitter bans President Trump? It's because we have all given Twitter power over us in our consumption of information.
We need a hell of a lot more humanities in the tech world to help us understand all this more, a ton more study of power relations, more study of actual history of how power flows. More history of, say, the reconstruction after the US Civil War and before the Civil Rights Movement, of how small towns exerted power over Black residents both through soft economic power and through political power, and how those two interplayed with each other.
There's so much to learn from history as we try to navigate power on social networks. But the dynamic you saw on LinkedIn has played out every week of every year in every city in the US. It's not unique to social media in any way, it's the same brain structures and personal relationships going on, just on slightly different scales. And we need to understand those if we are to make good technology, and good policy to program society.
