There are people who advocate the idea that private companies should be compelled to distribute hate speech, dangerously factually incorrect information and harassment under the concept that free speech is should be applied universally rather than just to government. I don't agree, I think it's a vast over-reach and almost unachievable to have both perfect free speech on these platforms and actually run them as a viable business.

But let's lay that aside, those people who make the argument claim to be adhering to an even stronger dedication to free speech. Surely, it's clear here that having the actual head of the US government threatening to shut down private companies for how they choose to manage their platforms is a far more disturbing and direct threat against free speech even in the narrowest sense.

Threatening to shut down private companies -- not for limiting speech, not for refusing to distribute speech -- but for exercising their own right to free speech alongside the free speech of others (in this case the president).

There is no right to unchallenged or un-responded-to speech, regardless of how you interpret the right to free speech.

There are forms of government where certain forms of speech cannot be challenged. Well, not safely anyway.

I should know, I lived for 20 years in that sort of place (Eastern Bloc kid).

I tried to make the question more precise, but I’m not quite sure what I’m asking. I guess I was hoping to hear more from you because normally I’ve only heard it from books, not from an actual person who lived under it.

pg’s trick for getting interesting answers is to ask "What surprised you the most?" That may be relevant here — if you had to pick some surprising differences, what specifically would they be?

I guess what would shock you is how normal it felt for us, back then. I mean, when that's all you know, that's just how it is.

You had to be careful with the general frame of the ideas that you expressed in public - but that was normal. You could not freely leave the country - but that was normal. Anything that had to do with the government was a bunch of lies - but that was normal.

Yet life went on. People grew up, got married, got a job, etc.

We used to tell a lot of jokes about the government - I guess as a way to cope. I miss those jokes.

I doubt he would shut Twitter down (if only because he needs it more than it needs him), but I don't doubt for a second that he would use the executive branch to retaliate against them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

I mean, I could have told you that when the already part-time CEO announced he'd move to Africa for a year :)

Dorsey is being incredibly smart by trying to figure out how to break into the African market. He probably wants to do payments there. Get in early, win the market. It's genius.

Just look at what's happening with Belt and Road.

Africa is going to be huge.

If I had his money and influence, I would be doing the same.

It’s definitely a threat. But I don’t see any people backing down, and using "chilling" to me is just pathos to try and make one side seem right. It’s a disagreement on what to do and how to run our big platforms.

— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Of course no social media company will be shut down over this- Trump has absolutely zero power in this regard (I think half of Trump's frustration is in realizing how little power a president truly has).

Anyway, he doesn't think he is a king. He thinks he is an emperor.

.. and ultimately, it was Twitter who said he has no clothes.

Weird times.

Twitter frequently selectively enforces its own terms of service. They punish some users and then intentionally let other users get away with atrocious behavior with no consequences. I've witnessed this across hundreds of various Twitter accounts over the last several years, so the number of times this happens must be rather epic. Numerous agencies of the US Government can choose to pursue Twitter for that. Twitter will find it impossible to correct their chaotic, selective, biased approach to how they treat their users so very differently. Angency N from the government slaps Twitter with an increasing fine each time they fail to properly, equitably enforce their terms of service. Start at $100 million and double it with every violation. Twitter will be bankrupt before a month is out.

Twitter would get on their knees and beg for mercy almost instantly. The US Government can break any corporation it wants to, anytime it wants to.

If the Trump Admin wants to be really devious, Nixonian, they'll target the executives operating the companies. Sending the IRS & Co. to make their lives a living hell. These companies will capitulate instantly.

Just ask the PRISM companies how this works in reality: you have no choice but to bow. It all depends on how nasty the Feds are prepared to get.

And on top of that would force the government to pay for Twitter's legal fees. And probably also for economic damages.

Then the US Gov't would be back at square one. Only worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-28/trump-fur...

As always with him, the proof is in the projection: he's accusing others of interfering in the election (states expanding mail in voting, Twitter, etc.) while he's actively doing it himself.

There is simply nothing that indicates voting by mail is less secure than our wonky voting machines, but there is plenty of evidence that ballots by mail help more people vote.

The only reason to oppose mail in voting, much like supporting rejiggering districts (gerrymandering), is to rig the vote. Your feelings of insecurity simply don’t matter, as they are entirely unfounded as well as flat out wrong.

Frankly, there are dozens of such cases in Oregon alone.

Your "assertion" does not "fit the facts"

Here’s an excerpt from your article about the devious voter fraudsters: "At the time of the election, (Robbins) was suffering from kidney infections which impacted his cognition," said Oregon Department of Justice spokeswoman Kristina Edmunson. "He does not remember voting two ballots, but acknowledges that he did and is extremely remorseful."

But that's the objection. Mail in voting is problematic because the fraud is so hard to detect.

Suppose someone obtains and submits a bunch of mail in ballots. Ballots of people who don't normally vote etc. How would they even get caught? "We haven't caught very many of them" is the problem.

> The only reason to oppose mail in voting, much like supporting rejiggering districts (gerrymandering), is to rig the vote.

You could say it's to prevent someone else from rigging the vote.

Also, this:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-is-no-evidence-th...

So if it doesn't really affect the balance of legitimate ballots and only makes fraud more difficult, why would somebody be against it unless they're legitimately concerned about fraud?

It's a thing that actually happens:

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/cudahy-officials-co...

https://www.dothaneagle.com/news/crime_court/woman-convicted...

https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/cahokia-village-tr...

There are also even more small time cases like this:

https://gvwire.com/2019/08/23/mexican-man-who-supports-trump...

Where it's only one person voting when they're not eligible. Those cases often aren't even prosecuted, but at scale it adds up.

Edit: clarity while trying to maintain brevity.

For a start in California mail in ballots have to be signed and the signature has to match the registered voter's signature on file.

So you're assuming someone can steal a bunch of registered voters' ballots and fake their signatures.

Grave ballots would require new/additional votes. That would sure the expected ballot returns.

There are a ton of ways to verify elections statistically that you could read into

That is some evidence that mail-in votes can be abused. And you should consider how hard it is to detect such abuse. I’d love to see some evidence on why the benefits of mail-in voting outweighs the risks.

Also some evidence on your claims that mail-in voting favors one particular party would be enlightening.

And I certainly did not claim that mail-in voting favors one particular party, simply that it enables more people to vote and is at least as secure as any other system of voting that we have in the US. That said, I think it is worth asking - why is one party, with truly zero supporting facts, so vehemently opposed to voting by mail? And why is it the same party that so unabashedly gerrymanders voting districts: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/how-the-...

I know political rants are semi-frowned upon these days on HN, but it is deeply important that we as a society figure this stuff out.

I think your distinction is valid and correct, but somewhat pedantic.

You said the only reason to oppose mail in voting is to rig the vote. That’s a pretty strong implication. But I would say an open mind would ask the other direction: why is anyone opposed to increasing voter integrity? You can’t simply ignore that. Voter integrity appeals to me as a normal-ass American with 1 vote.

You may have noticed I haven’t been political, and stay on principle. We as a society should be able to talk openly about principle without corrosive contempt for those with differing viewpoints.

Personally, I'd like to vote by mail because there's a bit of a global pandemic going on. Preventing me from voting in a safe way (with a simple, well-tested solution, I might add) is an outright assault on my right to vote. So the integrity of your vote is really harmed far more by the willful incompetence of those in power.

With ordinary mail fraud, the victim tends to notice. You have a bill for something but the something never arrives.

With mail in ballots, if someone registers people who didn't register themselves and then takes their ballots, the real constituents weren't expecting to get a ballot and then don't notice when none shows up.

There are also a lot of problems that have really nothing to do with mail fraud. When people fill out their ballots outside the context of a polling place with election monitors, anybody could be intimidating them or paying them to vote in a particular way and then verifying that they do.

I suppose the pandemic is a valid point for wanting to vote by mail, but concerns for voting integrity are still there. I think there should be an easy-to-implement contactless yet in-person way to vote (maybe similar to how you get a coronavirus test), which would avoid the rather drastic action of allowing universal mail-in voting. Know that there are many states who ban / regulate it for good reason.

163 cases of "fraudulent use of absentee ballots" over 1988-2017. Probably a lot more useful to worry about the scantron machine accuracy.

As has been demonstrated at DEFCON for years now, voting machines used in dozens of states are laughably insecure and easily tampered with. Mail-in ballots would be much more difficult to pull off large scale voting fraud with due to their distributed nature.

And the distributed nature is the problem. At the polls you have representatives of both major parties there to make sure nothing untoward is happening. How are you supposed to secure something that happens literally anywhere?

Voter intimidation is a lot easier, for example, if you know where and when to turn up.

You would probably find it easier to tamper with a voting machine if you know where they're going to be, and if more people have access to them, too.

But for the same reason it's a lot easier to prevent. If you show up at the polls to intimidate voters you get arrested. If you do it to other members of your household, or your employees or union members, nobody there is independent. Anybody who reports it still has to live or work with those people the next day, so people don't report it.

> You would probably find it easier to tamper with a voting machine if you know where they're going to be, and if more people have access to them, too.

Not when there are election monitors there watching you. With paper ballots you fill out your ballot behind a screen, but you drop it into the machine in front of everybody.

Also, many of the voting machine vulnerabilities are as a result of submitting specially crafted ballots. Which is another reason you want to give people their ballot and have them fill it out by hand and submit it immediately, instead of giving them an unlimited amount of time and access to a computer and a printer while "filling out" their ballot.

Of course the better solution in either case is to use voting machines without security vulnerabilities, but there aren't always enough ponies for everybody.

Yes, if this is consistently and fairly enforced, I agree - only doubting that it is because I honestly don't know, and hopefully never have to find out firsthand.

> many of the voting machine vulnerabilities are as a result of submitting specially crafted ballots

Yeah, fair enough. I don't know enough about the vulnerabilities, but if this is the case, I agree.

That's more than five cases a year, of those that have been caught. Five stolen elections a year seems like a lot.

> Probably a lot more useful to worry about the scantron machine accuracy.

The scantron machine isn't purposely trying to alter the election results so the errors it makes aren't all in the same direction.

As with most of Trump's dumber scandals, he has already literally confessed to his impure motives.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-nw-nyt-mail-v...

The single largest case of voter fraud in this countries history happened in North Carolina in 2018. That was committed by a Republican.

If you investigate the voter fraud instances in Trumps own listing you will find that the majority of them are committed by Republicans.

Combine this information with the efforts by Republicans to suppress the vote and you can see the problem. In North Dakota, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law that required all citizens to have a physical mailing address to be able to vote. Sounds resonible right? Well, this was after a Democrat won a Senate election in that state thanks in large part to the Native American population. Most Native Americans live on reservations in that state and part of living on the reservations is a lack of physical mailing addresses.

Nothing about having a physical address is going to make voter fraud less likely. It's plain as day that Republicans are just interested in suppressing the votes of people who vote against them.

The Chicago "Democratic Machine" laughs and says "hold my beer."

I don’t care who commits the fraud. I want my vote to count as it should. So that’s a why I believe we should be vigilant about mail in voter fraud.

Your Native American example is an example of a corner case that should be addressed properly. Indeed it is unfair if there were no other ways for Native Americans to vote (surely they could vote in person? If not, I’d classify that as a violation of rights). But this doesn’t extend generally, not does it nullify general mail vote fraud concerns.

And I would add more evidence under the claim ‘majority of fraud committed by Republicans’ in order to be more convincing.

There is nothing about a reservation that prevents it from having a mailing address. People on reservations receive mail all the time. Even someone who doesn't currently know what it is can find out. And it seems like a pretty crappy voter suppression method if it at best only works until people figure out what their mailing address is.

> Nothing about having a physical address is going to make voter fraud less likely.

Having a physical address proves you live in the district. It prevents people from making a mistake and voting in the wrong elections, or voting in the wrong elections on purpose. It gives the government something to investigate if they suspect fraud. The perpetrator will either have to give their real address (leading investigators right to them) or a fake address (allowing investigators to prove that person doesn't live there).

> It's plain as day that Republicans are just interested in suppressing the votes of people who vote against them.

The Democrats do the same thing. They regularly e.g. schedule school board elections off-cycle (a separate election day than the major elections for statewide offices) so that most people don't show up, which allows the election to be dominated by teachers unions. And there isn't even a pretext for doing that -- it has no other purpose, and wastes a ton of money to hold a separate election.

The effect may be large or it may be small, but there will be an effect. If you truly cared about voter integrity you would care about this too.

Every current and past Secretary of State from each state will tell you election fraud happens, and that it's rare enough it doesn't have an effect on the outcome.

Trump is lying when he said there is a 100% certainty of a rigged election if there's widespread mail-in ballots. Be clear about what he means by rigged. A system-wide fraud that influences the outcome of an election.

It's the same kind of lie about 3 million voters being "illegals" in 2016 and why he lost the popular vote. It's the same kind of lie he told about buses being shipped up from Massachusetts to New Hampshire to explain why he lost New Hampshire. The same lies about "you will not believe what my people are finding in Hawaii" about Obama's birth certificate. And the thousands of people cheering on 9/11. And the hundreds of people he knew who died on 9/11 yet went to no funerals, zero zip.

And it's the same tactic he used in 2016 to set the stage for his loss. When asked if he would accept election results if he lost he refused to say yes, he only said he'd accept the election results if he won.

He excels at creating doubt and confusion. That's his entire life history way before he was in politics.

He's an asshole. He's a complete waste of space. He's a whiny little bitch. He's always been this way. It's not new. He was this way when he was a Democrat too. As president. As candidate. Before he was even in politics. He has always been a piece of shit asshole. He will always be a piece of shit asshole. And hilariously this is a completely unremarkable observation. The absurd claim would be that he's a compassionate person of strong ethical and moral character, a role model you want your kids to look up to, mimic, and be like when they grow up.

Who they would have voted for isn't actually relevant. The fact that they didn't (in our hypothetical) vote as a result of the FUD is evidence of interference.

If someone was making robocalls telling voters that voting machines in their district weren't to be trusted and some number of people didn't vote, would you consider that to be interference?

> And you can’t ignore the main point, which is voter integrity, which I as a normal American agree with.

What is a "normal American" and why would you say that in this context?

By definition, I'm a "normal American" and I also care about "voter integrity". However, I just have absolutely no reason to believe that mail-in voting, which has been used widely for decades by the select states (blue and red) which allow everyone to do it and by _every_ state which allows for absentee voting, is any less secure than any other method.

If you've seen any of the presentations/POCs from Defcon's Voting Machine Hacking Village, read anything about how easily Diebold machines can be manipulated, etc. I just can't believe you'd make the argument that mail-in voting is less secure in good faith.

To be specific, here you can only use mail-in ballots as an exception if you live outside the border of Sweden, and you can only make a request to use the mail-in ballot if you visit an embassy first or use the digital identity system through one of the Swedish banks, which then operate similar to the embassy in its role in identification processing.

Naturally using less security does not mean fraud has happened in the past, but it should be relevant to the question if fraud may happen in the future. If we have factually evidence it won't happen then Sweden should change it rules to make it easier for people to vote and reduce costs to embassies. If we are uncertain, well, then the question is a fair game to ask what is good enough security and what isn't.

We don't know that the mail-in ballot system here in California is absolutely, with 100% certainty, immune to abuse. We do have reasonably good circumstantial evidence at this point that it does not appear to increase the chance for voter fraud, and furthermore, we have reasonably good evidence, based on multiple studies conducted over many years that anyone can easily find if they care to, that there are very, very few fraudulent ballots cast in American elections. There is, however, also reasonably good evidence that American elections have a history of efforts to prevent eligible voters from casting votes at all, and that this is far and away the kind of "voter fraud" that we need to be concerned about.

As a general axiom, therefore, in American elections, campaigns that have as their goal making it more difficult for eligible voters to vote in the name of "reducing fraud" should be viewed with, well, a high degree of suspicion.

If we are going by evidence then finding the cause of the lower voting participation in the US should be the goal, for which there exist plenty of research studies conducted over many decades. A lot of people have wondered why there is such a large difference between EU and US. The general conclusions is not the lack of more easy to use internet based solutions, but rather to concepts like minimum wages, trust in government, belief in the efficacy of voting, combining the system of taxation to voter registration, access to voting centers, and voter fatigue when people have to vote in multiple elections in close proximity.

The resistance and general suspicion to internet based solutions with weak security should not be taken as a campaign to make it more difficult for eligible voters to vote. A government website where an anonymous user can put in a a registered person postal address in order to trigger part of the voting process should be viewed with legit suspicion.

- minimum wages - trust in government - belief in the efficacy of voting - combining the system of taxation to voter registration - access to voting centers - and voter fatigue when people have to vote in multiple elections in close proximity

(Let me add disenfranchisement after a prison sentence etc, too.)

And he should not make a stink about mail votes and any number of random accussations. Look at the big picture. He has us debating the finer nuances about one tiny individual bomb in his ground covering barrage of crap. Mission accomplished. How's the Corona effort going, by the way?

Pretty good if you don't live in Stockholm. The worst hit areas is the retirement homes around the Stockholm region, which account for most deaths. The other areas of Sweden are operating mostly like normal except for industries that been effected by closed borders. Economically we are currently a bit ahead compared to our neighbors because of difference in tactics in handling the pandemic, but it is expected to go down as the Swedish economy is comparable more depended on exports. Most news focus on the economic depression as a result of the pandemic rather than on the health sector. Latest news is that a few airports are closing down, and that the partially state owned airline is having economical problems.

The fact that there's a new conservative talking point about the dangers of voting by mail (and no other aspects of voting security) shows that this message is bullshit.

The reality is that the conservative party actively works to curtail voting because they are in the minority and it's the only way for them to stay in power.

Well, that's the tactical reason.

Bigger picture, conservativism is about narrowing and liberalism about broadening and equalizing access to the levers of power; conservatives for narrowing the franchise both because of immediate tactical advantage and because of fundamental ideological reasons.

I've had little love for every Republican administration, but this is the first time I'm actually afraid of them. What is happening now is not conservatism, it's fascism with a dash of Christian Dominionism.

> Bigger picture, conservativism is about narrowing and liberalism about broadening and equalizing access to the levers of power; conservatives for narrowing the franchise both because of immediate tactical advantage and because of fundamental ideological reasons.

Are you in marketing? Because you sound like it, and I'm not buying what your selling.

Let's try Wikipedia for grins:

"Traditionalist conservatism, also referred to as classical conservatism, traditional conservatism or traditionalism, is a political and social philosophy emphasizing the need for the principles of a transcendent moral order, manifested through certain natural laws to which society ought to conform in a prudent manner."

Now that's a bit better. Using that definition tell me how that applies to Trump's GOP.

Disclaimer: I have no love for the DNC either, but at least with them it's a more genteel corruption and their ostensible goals are not entirely unpalatable.

p.s. @dang, I'm in dangerous territory here being political on HN, but it was meant to be germane to the OP.

You're ascribing to conservativism what should belong to a particular political party at a particular time. Yes, the current Republican party does intend to limit franchise by minorities, and this has literally been stated ala Hofeller.

That is not a conservative position and many things the Republican party does are not actually conservative.

Just as Democrats at their worse can be about finding equality by restricting rights and treating people like zoo animals, the Republicans at their worse are about winning the power grab ethics be damned. And at those extremes, neither party represents the values of liberalism or conservativism.

No, I'm ascribing to conservativism what has defined it since the classic liberal/conservative divide emerged in the Enlightenment (well, except that at the very beginning the conservative position was merely to retain the existing narrow distribution of access to the levers of power, resting on appeals to religious and other traditional bases; it's only after the liberal side had some success in broadening access that the conservative position became actively reversing that progress, but it has remained so since.)

The Reactionary Mind - Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reactionary_Mind

I hope not. Their treatment and forced castration of autistic people carried on for most of the last century was horrid.

Free speech means you have the right to express yourself. It does not mean a private company is at all required to give you a platform... They can moderate content as they choose.

As far as tagging an individual user account in this way, I'm sure there are provisions for that in the TOS that Trump agreed to in order to use the site.

On a legal level, I can't imagine anything has been done wrong. On an ethical level, the only problem I see so far might be that Twitter is taking it upon themselves to be fact checkers, and personally I don't mind so far, I think the public benefit probably far outweighs any negatives.

wait, 938 convictions over what looks like is over two decades? Just in the presidential election years that's something like 625 million votes. That's very little fraud.

(and there's some nonsense in there if it's trying to present itself as voter fraud...like the California cases of candidates misrepresenting their home address. What does that have to do with any voters?)

http://www.g-a-i.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Voter-Fraud-...

I'm also not sure about the methodology there, so perhaps someone could explain it to me.

From what it looks like, GAI started with 60,000 matches from the state data. Then they... added additional identifiers and confirmed c.7000 of them? How do you get from uncertain data to more certain data in this way?

There seem to be c.15,000 instances of prohibited addresses being registered, which I don't believe alone indicates voter fraud.

GAI was unable to conduct a comprehensive review since a complete data set of state voter rolls is currently unobtainable. (it was denied)

I think the other major concern I have, other than the methodology, are the definitions - I still don't know whether 8500 represents 8500 people who voted twice (17000 total votes cast), or 4250 people who voted twice, or something in between, or some thing completely different. Perhaps I missed this.

And of course even if the sheer number of votes is not on the same order of magnitude as all votes cast, we should still worry because a relatively small number of votes can have an outsized effect when placed appropriately.

Edit: as the first page states, this is not a comprehensive list, but a ‘sampling’.

great, but what does that have to do with providing evidence that

> There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent."

is not substantial nonsense based on zero evidence, but more importantly (given that this thread is about "lying"), that

> The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one.

isn't at all true?

The below is just a snapshot. Just a teensy-weensy bit of research will give you hundreds of articles like the below.

Report from Government Accountability Institute: http://www.g-a-i.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Voter-Fraud-...

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2018/07/11/voter-fraud-inves...

https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/oakland-county/2...

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-skid-row-voter-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/central-figur...

https://www.dothaneagle.com/news/crime_court/fourth-person-c...

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2018/07/11/voter-fraud-inves...

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-09/duplicat...

You must love philosophy. Is this really the first you have heard someone use a hypothetical in an ethical argument?

Let’s see fact checks on diet claims, exercise, claims about social solutions, claims about the economy, etc., etc. Let’s see fact checks on their own advertisers.

They don't have to be perfect. They don't have to save the world. They don't have to cure cancer. Any improvement is an improvement.

Life is not binary.

If twitter created some arbitrary rule like "We're going to fact-check all state/government personnel.", then the state/government personnel would just change platforms.

it's a real issue -- it's potentially more dangerous to push politicians to lie on platforms that fact-checkers can't respond and provide feedback towards, and if twitter starts playing hardball against politicians that's exactly what will happen.

A ton of small echo-chamber communities that splinter off as a result of perceived hostility or discrimination from twitter (but really any social media group) and the general public may be more hostile/dangerous than having these groups of people being vetted by the public at large constantly on twitter or other popular platforms.

Meanwhile, I make the claim that the echo chambers will stagnate rapidly outside a big platform. The echo chambers need constant exposure to gain new ideological members. If left to a private-club-platform, they will not showcase themselves.

Note that there is a strong adherence to the YCombinator’s code of conduct on the current platform - but we come back to discuss ideas here, not to a not-vetted forum. By making the level of adherence to fact checks, discussions will improve.

Yes it is, it just involves adding an html element below it

> Will they get into the business of fact checking everyone over certain number of followers

Their choice, because of the first amendment they can do it to anyone or noone at their leisure or based on whatever criteria they like and as arbitrarily as they like.

> Will they do it impartially world-wide

Their choice, because of the first amendment they can choose to be as impartial or as partial as they like as locally or globally as they like.

> How can they even be impartial world wide given the different contradictory points of view, valid from both sides

The simplest solution is to not be impartial, but that's a decision that is wholly up to them and whatever they decide is protected by the first amendment

See how simple it is? They do whatever they feel like and the government is obligated to not interfere. The end.

(Other governments might object to some of these decisions, the US government most certainly has no legal power to)

An evolved, but still incorrect view is that a private entity is legally or constitutionally obligated to apply their policy about hosting speech consistently across all users.

There are tons of edge cases with free speech, but we almost certainly want the free market to experiment with potential solutions. It would be great if there were attempts at a free speech Twitter, a free of hate Twitter, free of disinformation Twitter, etc. and let the chips fall where they may.

And it seems the market have already chosen that a slightly moderated but not too heavily model seems to retain and attract the most users.

Twitter I don't think is putting in place these moderation mechanism for fun or through their own personal CEO's own moral and ethics. They do what they think will be best for business.

From a free speech perspective, it's straightforward, private parties can choose to relay (or not) whatever viewpoints they want, and can choose to relay those viewpoints with or without commentary.

From a "what’s an ideal policy" perspective, maybe it's not, but "your policy is not ideal" isn't an exception to free speech justifying government intervention.

> How can they even be impartial

Private actors aren't required to be impartial. In fact, the whole premise of the marketplace of ideas is that private parties will be partial in choosing which ideas to present and how to present them.

The issue is that a few giant corporations have got a cartel going. It's really an antitrust problem which is only a speech problem because the market is the marketplace of ideas.

What would NOT be lawful would be Trump to close them down because they did what they did. That is full stop illegal if he did it. Not sure how legal it even is to threaten it this way.

At this point, Twitter might as well even close Trump's account. Still legal, still within their rights.

now if they want to use limited public goods, well then there's a role for the FCC or something like it...

Could that be a 'limited public good'? Due to the network effects, it seems like only one website at a time would hold this status.

Now that it's here, and they're all on it.. "the coffee shop can throw you out" seems a little trite. I don't like Trump either, set him aside, what if we were on the wrong side of Twitter's politics?

I'd be fine with retaining Twitter's right to add commentary, as they did to Trump, as long as it's clear who's saying what.

Even without explicit abuse, this is effectively the government saying "you must transmit this information, no matter what", which is an unwelcome intrusion of governmental power, in my opinion.

Check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier

What would be novel in twitter's case, is that rather than recognizing that the phone company is a natural physical monopoly and hence must not refuse service to the politically unpopular, twitter is more of a natural social monopoly because of network effects. It would be an expansion of the doctrine, but it's arguably justified to the extent that you can't just go 'start your own twitter'.

Child porn is unprotected speech that does not enjoy first amendment protections. What you are advocating for is giving the government control over forms of protected speech, which is a whole different ball of wax. Creating precedent that the government should regulate acknowledged protected speech is not a good idea at all.

> What would be novel in twitter's case, is that rather than recognizing that the phone company is a natural physical monopoly and hence must not refuse service to the politically unpopular, twitter is more of a natural social monopoly because of network effects

Twitter is not a monopoly.

If that's the case, the common carrier concept is helpfully already fleshed out for us in the law.

Good night.

You're not intending to, but by giving the government the ability to regulate political speech you are.

And yes; telling Twitter what they can do with political speech is governmental regulation of protected speech. You're giving the government to decide what forms of protected speech get extra special protection, which is a form of regulation.

> I am suggesting that Twitter might be a monopoly, and subject to the common carrier doctrine, on "being the watering whole for the entire media/political class".

So, I can declare any company a monopoly if they have cornered a specific user base, no matter how vague? Is Slack now a monopoly because they're popular in tech offices? Can I regulate declare Reddit a monopoly for sports fans and regulate it as such?

What is the general principle that will decide whether or not a company should be regulated as a monopoly? And how in the world do you define the "media" class in order to regulate companies like Twitter?

Only 22% of Americans use Twitter daily. That is not a monopoly, period.

> but I think we can all agree that you can't just start your own Twitter and have the same unique position of political influence.

Sure, but that's no argument for an expansion of government power.

Good night.

The basic problem you're going to run into is that common carrier status was designed to ensure equal public access to limited resources. In most cases this will either be a physically limited resource (railways, pipelines, power lines, long haul fiber) or access to resources that were actually created by the government (radio frequencies, highways, licensed taxicabs). Common carrier status is frequently also applied where eminent domain was used to create the infrastructure in the first place.

Basically, common carrier was designed to solve the problem of limited infrastructure, and their application to telecommunications has been spotty. I would remind you that ISPs are not common carriers under US law. Ma Bell might've gotten broken up, but the power of the FCC to do that was actually repealed in 1996.

The problem is that social media networks aren't a limited resource, at all. The damn things keep popping up, closing, and buying each other. I've had well over a dozen social media website accounts so far at least, and that's probably under counting.

So any attempt to declare Twitter specifically a common carrier is going to have to center around this idea that they have a monopoly on media and political figures. Of course this is an extremely vague concept; how do you decide who is a "media" or "political" figure? And what percentage of them must be on a site before that site should become a common carrier? What if they’re on multiple social sites at once? And how exactly do you define what is and is not censorable wherever media figures are present? And how in the world would you codify this into law in a way that wouldn't be overturned as unconstitutional?

Honestly, the contortions required to make Twitter a common carrier are so strained, they strike me as something started with the end goal in mind.

Would that make political parties illegal?

IANAL but an example could be:

Someone posts a pirate ebook on their facebook profile. They can hide behind the "yeah but it was the user" harbor.

vs.

Someone posts a pirate ebook on a facebook profile, facebook staff thinks it's cool and puts it on a special themed section called "Pirate picks from today". They will be in trouble.

they didn't edit anything; it was very clear what he posted and it was his exact words as written. there weren't even any dark ui patterns to make it look like the fact check was part of what he said.

Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which immunized from tort liability "interactive computer service[s]", was passed in response to a 1995 NY state court case that found Prodigy liable for statements posted on a forum by one of its users. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod.... The test the judge employed in that case was the degree to which Prodigy exercised editorial control over user-posted content, and in that case the judge found Prodigy exercised such sufficient editorial control that the discretion it effectively exercised in failing to remove the statement made Prodigy liable.

If Section 230 was revoked then that test of editorial control would presumably become the law in many if not most U.S. states as, AFAIU, the test wasn't created out of whole cloth, but rooted in well-established precedent. Some states might go another way but I doubt it; categorical, bright line limitations on liability are an unusual feature of judge-made law (which emphasizes fairness in the context of the particular parties, with less weight given to hypotheticals about society-wide impacts) and are typically created by statute. Other jurisdictions seem to have ended up applying very similar rules as the NY court, and even supposed Section 230 analogs (e.g. EU Directive 2000/31/EC) seem more like the NY rule in practical effect than Section 230's strong, categorical protections. Manifest editorial control seems like a sensible test for deciding when a failure to remove constitutes negligence; sensible, at least, if you're going to depart from strong Section 230-like protections. But I would expect significant variance in the degree of control required to be exhibited absent a national rule. In any event, massive sites like Twitter and Facebook might be faced with some stark choices--go all-in on censorship, or take a completely hands-off approach a la Usenet.

2. Twitter already automatically adds posts to special themed sections called "What's happening", so even if you were right there is no added liability.

3. Adding fact checking is not adding things to special themed sections, so this is off topic.

But whether or not you like the feature, the idea that the president of the United States would threaten "shutting down" Twitter because he doesn’t like a feature is beyond the pale, full stop.

> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230)

To sum up: If the platform becomes the "information content provider", defined as "any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information", then they loose the protection. The statute also excepts federal criminal liability and intellectual property claims.

Creation or development of information can exclusively be moderation, as has been shown in copyright cases. Cutting (deciding what to show and what not to show), re-arrange or changing the context can create new original work, which would make the creator an information content provider for that. At the same time, doing either of those does not automatically cause the moderator to become a creator of original work.

As lawyers like to say, it all depends on the details of the specific case. To take a extreme example outside of this twitter discussion, taking an video interview and cutting it to create a new narrative would make the editor responsible for that whole new version.

But not for the purposes of section 230. And there's significant precedent to this effect that you'd need a supreme Court ruling to change it.

To take an fictional twitter example, blocking a user from a website is unlikely to create a derivative work. Removing a post in the middle of a twitter chain that makes up a story could change the narrative and content of that story, and if done intentionally would create a derivative work. The user could then sue twitter for copyright infringement, and if the new story is defamatory, under liability laws. We could for example imagine a rape story where the post that includeded the word "Stop" was removed, where the author would then have a legit legal claim against the moderation.

It all depend on context, intent, and the details of a specific case. The tools of moderation does not define what is legal and what is not.

Be a bit more tolerant of other people's point of view.

Anyway, I think you are misinterpreting the intention of that sentence. It basically means that, in principle, the behavior of being a "provider or user of an interactive computer service" does not imply that it is "the publisher or speaker of any information provided [...]". But that does not exempt them from potentially being the actual publisher, and all the rights/obligations that go with it.

Trivial example: Someone publishing its work on the web (hence becoming a "user of an interactive computer service") does not imply that they lose copyright; even though they "shall [not] be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided [...]".

Again, IANAL, but I read a lot of copyright, safe harbor law, DCMAs, etc... and it goes like that.

They're not wrong. Every single time Section 230 comes up, there's somebody here arguing that Section 230 doesn't actually mean that companies can choose who they want to censor without becoming a publisher.

But it does. That was the explicit point of Section 230, and that's how Section 230 has played out in legal courts ever since it was established.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

----

But of course, that entire debate about Section 230 is irrelevant here because Twitter hasn't censored anybody, and I haven't seen anyone give a clear reason why neutrality requirements on commentary wouldn't be outright unconstitutional, regardless of what Section 230 says.

From your own quoted source:

"A defendant must satisfy each of the three prongs to gain the benefit of the immunity:

1. [...]

2. [...]

3. The information must be "provided by another information content provider," i.e., the defendant must not be the "information content provider" of the harmful information at issue."

The moment you create your own content (even if you are a content provider yourself) you lose the protection of Section 230 over that. Editing/policing content is, in most cases, akin to creating content. You cannot make a list of "staff picks" and then claim that the content comes from other sources. Putting that list together (even if you're just quoting somebody else) is equivalent to an action of creation, you are the creator of that list. You chose what to put in it and what to exclude. You ARE the original creator of this and Section 230 does not apply for you.

No. Practically every social network and publisher creates their own content occasionally, yet there's plenty of precedent for companies like Google, Ebay, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook being protected under Section 230.

A better, more accurate way of phrasing your objection would be to say, "Section 230 does not protect you from lawsuits over the specific content you created." So if Twitter's company-written annotation was found to be libel, they could of course be sued over that.

But adding your own content to a forum/platform has no bearing on whether Section 230 applies more broadly to other content that you host. Take a deeper look at your example:

> You cannot make a list of "staff picks" and then claim that the content comes from other sources

This is exactly what Amazon, Apple, and Google Play do every day. And all of those platforms have been ruled to be protected by Section 230 in multiple lawsuits -- covering everything from trademark violations to defective products. The fact that Amazon has a "recommended brand" section does not mean that they are liable for everything that shows up on their store. And that's a principle that's held up in real courts over, and over, and over again.

> Editing/policing content

I don't want to keep beating the same horse, but that's not what Twitter did. They didn't edit Trump's tweet or restrict it, they added their own speech next to Trump's tweet. That has nothing to do with Section 230, it's just a generic, common case of 1st Ammendment protected counterspeech.

I was talking in a broad sense. I never accused or defended twitter of doing anything. Please stop making such weak strawmans.

Regarding the rest of your arguments, you're basically agreeing with me with a different set of words. I am glad you got the point :).

Why would I tolerate a blatant falsehood?

> that does not exempt them from being the actual publisher, and all the rights/obligations that go with it.

With respect, you're totally misinformed. Social media websites do not fall under any kind of "publisher" obligation, this is a totally made up meme that people spread online.

Now, if you want to argue that we should change the laws so that these websites would fall under some kind of publisher obligations, I would disagree, but that would at least allow room for "tolerance of other people's point of view". However, in terms of the actual law you and the parent are unequivocally incorrect.

If a Twitter user posts child porn (which is an example of an illegal act in the US), and Twitter knows that it is on the platform and does not remove the content, do you know if Twitter would therefore become liable for the content?

(Again, this is more exploring Section 230, not about the specific controversy du jour.)

Section 230 also wouldn't have necessarily protected them before SESTA/FOSTA either, federal criminal liability was always exempted. It's just that SESTA/FOSTA made that a lot more explicit and generally widened that liability.

Section 230 isn't a blanket protection against literally anything (it also has a number of holes surrounding copyright). It's just a much broader protection than many people online think, and the areas where it doesn't protect platforms typically don't line up well with where Internet commenters think it shouldn't protect companies.

IANAL, don't go out and do something stupid and then claim that I said it was legally OK. But in general a good heuristic for talking about Section 230 online is that it's, "not unlimited, but probably broader than you're thinking." But if you're trying to launch your own service or something and you want legal advice about where exactly the line is drawn, you should talk to an actual lawyer.

Section 230 isn't absolute, there are several specific exceptions. One example is the FOSTA law from 2017 which explicitly overrides Section 230.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1865

> The bill amends the Communications Act of 1934 to declare that section 230 does not limit: (1) a federal civil claim for conduct that constitutes sex trafficking, (2) a federal criminal charge for conduct that constitutes sex trafficking, or (3) a state criminal charge for conduct that promotes or facilitates prostitution in violation of this bill.

There are some other examples I'm not thinking of off the top of my head, but on a note directed more towards the general discussion, I'd point out that creating laws to limit the scope of Section 230 is illustrative of the kind of freedoms it affords site operators in the general case.

No one said they did. But also Section 230 does not imply that they're exempt of that, in the case they become such a thing. And remember that those rights/obligations are acquired the moment they are exercised.

Consider the following:

Twitter (the platform), on its official twitter account (on their own platform) decides to publish something which has legal repercussions. Are they exempt of them because of that statement on Section 230? No, not at all.

Section 230 does NOT give the NYT immunity for anything in the articles themselves, where they operate as a publisher. However, absent S. 230 protection, those articles and their publisher still enjoy regular First Amendment protection, which is quite strong. In particular, there are nearly insurmountable obstacles for a public figure to win a defamation lawsuit in the US.

You're aware that comments on NYT articles are also human-moderated, yes?

(2) Civil liability

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected [...]

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230

No, not at all, because Section 230 has nothing to say about the scenario you are describing.

> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information _provided by another information content provider_

In your scenario Twitter is the provider of the information, so naturally they are liable for the legal repercussions of posting that information. Everyone already understands how this works intuitively, obviously when something illegal or otherwise legally significant is posted to the internet there isn't even a question of whether or not the posting platform is legally responsible for it as long as they are perceived to be taking reasonable steps to remove the offending content. If the site operators are posting the questionable content directly then obviously they are liable.

That's not what we're talking about though, we're discussing twitter having labled Trump's tweet as misinformation. I guess you're suggesting that twitter is the "publisher" of that warning and thus they are legally responsible for it, which is true, but there is nothing illegal about what they published so the hypothetical is moot.

Meaning that the statement by eanzenberg:

>"As they move into a "publisher" role, they will be liable in count (sic)."

Is not wrong. At least not over what concerns Section 230.

To paraphrase and summarize the whole discussion:

"As they move into a "publisher" role, Section 230 will not exempt them from what they do."

I'm glad we came to an understanding but this is a strawman. You might as well be saying "Section 230 does not exempt twitter from the law". This is very obviously not something anyone is arguing.

I would like to see it greatly narrowed.

Even if we ignore this particular instance as a special case where the act was justified, large companies having unfettered control over most political discourse in the country, and wielding that power in an arbitrary, unaccountable way is still a problem.

Yes, if Twitter publishes something defamatory in their own name, they're liable. No, they are not the publisher of any content they choose to moderate.

I am not a free speech extremist, and recognise you need to balance the competing demands as these platforms are defacto digital town squares. There are several problems that currently exist. They are:

1) Who decides what is and isn't on the platform Now that the web has effectively been centralised into a handful of organisations, being locked out of a platform can be seriously harmful. There are no appeals, or arbitration on decisions made. No courts to provide an independent check.

2) Asymmetry of rule application The biggest issue is rules are not applied fairly. Certain types of people seem free to repeatedly break the rules on platforms without recourse.

(If you want to argue that a platform is treating people differently because of political affiliation, then yes, I'd agree that the argument about Masterpiece Cakeshop would apply - but it's far from obvious that any platform is in fact treating people differently because of political affiliation.)

My point was not on the merits of the case, but rather that many people on one side demand that this be made illegal, and yet on the other demand that twitter shut trump up. They demand free speech for themselves while silencing critics.

If Trump posted that America was being invaded by little green men from outer space would it be unreasonable to annotate that too?

I also don't know that I would want Trump to be silenced, since he's often his own worst critic.

I don't think Twitter is stopping him from saying bad things, either; in fact, they're pretty explicitly letting him say things, and they just happen to have something to say about what he's said, too.

On the other hand, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube et al are undoubtedly massively influential on the public opinion and their corporate position on political topics - Yoel Roth's recent tweets serve as a decent example, showing clearly that this person cannot be an objective "fact checker" - essentially create a public forum where I am not able to exercise my first amendment rights (and, legally speaking, rightfully so). I cannot help but to find this very concerning.

YouTube (despite numerous issues with their interpretation of free speech), for instance, starting linking Wiki articles under videos that cover certain topics or are uploaded by certain channels. Videos by the BBC show a notice that the BBC is a British public broadcast service, simply informing the viewer about the fact that any bias they might encounter can be easily identified (feel free to switch "BBC" with "RT"). I've found that to be a decent middle ground between outright suppressing views by a corporation pretending to be the authority on certain topics and broadcasting everything without any context.

[1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p035w97h/episodes/downloads

For me, free speech is fundamentally about trying to rectify the injustice of an imbalance of power between those in authority and the ordinary citizen. During the Enlightenment, the authorities were monarchs, but even before that, the origins of free speech can be seen in the Reformation, the authorities being the established Church and the battles being eg the right to a Bible in your own language or the right to worship without priests.

In modern times, authorities can be just straightforward, well, authoritarian. Global leaders & business people who tweet or post on FB carry an authority ex officio that make their proclamations much more acceptable to the neutral reader. That in itself is a dangerous situation and Twitter or FB absolutely need to take control. If these companies want us to take them seriously as champions of free speech, they have to play their role to help restore that balance of power, by being far more stringent about fact-checking the tweets of those global leaders than they would be for ordinary posters.

Those right-wingers who love to proclaim themselves champions of free speech are really objecting to the Tyranny of the Majority. That is not an authority that requires a rebalance of power. It is just an established opinion.

What about the executive and majority stockowners of these companies, and how they might abuse their power?

I would rather prefer a federated structure like email. Anybody can choose their own clients to generate their own biased/unbiased feeds, and with plugins for fact checking.

Elizabeth Warren had a position on making the big tech companies open platforms. That was along the same lines, and would provide a far better solution than handing off the power to control people off to FB and Twitter execs

A tyranny of the majority—which you appear not to understand is a bad thing[0]—is a disaster and precisely what modern democratic institutions seek to avoid. It always leads to the repression of minorities, whether that's ethnic minorities, religious minorities, or political minorities. I doubt you would be much in favor of tyranny by a majority of a different political persuasion.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

There has never been "unbiased" media in the USA. Even PBS, NPR, and in other countries the CBC and BBC have been (often quite rightly) accused of bias.

I’m not sure what the ultimate answer to "fair public discourse" is, but "government regulated media" surely isn’t the answer we want.

I don't object to a good-faith defense of Twitter etc. as arbiters of truth, because it's entirely possible they'll do a good job and become a responsible authority. I do object to the idea that only the political right would have a problem with them, and that the only problem anyone could have is tyranny of the majority. I'm more worried about tyranny of Jack Dorsey than tyranny of the majority.

The BBC is the last place I'd look to understand free speech. There is a reason why orwell based the ministry of truth on the bbc.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves with the current political climate. Everyone forgets the Y axis on the political compass! This is why people who understand that both parties are authoritarian could see past the Russiagate and other bullshits but most of the country couldn't.

If one is still falling for the left/right paradigm one won't be able to understand the bigger picture at play. It's much more about authoritarianism vs libertarianism.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lLcpcytUnWU

There are a tiiiiny number of companies that are controlling global communications, and that should make us all uncomfortable.

Being banned from one restaurant in town, should not mean you're banned from all restaurants in the world.

Swastikas have a rich cultural history from long before NSDAP.

EDIT: to all the down-voters, I am not sure why the down-votes, but I suspect doing a Web search for "japan swastika" or similar may enlighten you.

EDIT2: FTR, I did not think of my post as some supposed big revelation, rather I mostly wanted to share my appreciation for the various Swastika forms (as old graphical art); and also thought banning Swastikas in general might be insensitive to Asians.

Probably because the point you're trying to make here is 1) nitpicking a detail of a hypothetical example which wasn't particularly relevant to the discussion, and 2) the "but it's not always a symbol of hate" argument is a rather common neo-Nazi talking point.

I don't think that quite describes the situation. Those with no money often have no recourse against Google, Facebook or CNN. But those with money whether individuals or corporation (even outside the media world), have many ways of shaping opinion, whether that shaping is public relations, SEO, media-creation or legal action.

Just during the time that Facebook has attempted to spread the standard, cautiously wide mainstream view of covid and the shutdown through their information center, I've received an ocean of polarizing false-claims about Covid and the shutdown through sponsored ads. Those ads cost money and they certainly show how today, money, any money, has a voice.

> Being banned from one restaurant in town, should not mean you're banned from all restaurants in the world.

So is the suggestion that I should be forced to serve people I don't want to serve?

The problem with social media is that the big platforms, like the post office or your ISP often ends up as an natural monopoly that can be just as dangerous to your political freedoms as any out of control government department by virtue of being just as powerful in the real world.

To be clear, current US law protects things that one can not change about themselves eg: race --and even this is a bit of an oversimplification (see being gay or a woman)-- but it in no way prevents a restaurant from serving someone because of the attire they are wearing or the speech they are speaking.

A classic example being that it is permissible to refuse to rent an apartment to a lawyer. (And in fact this is common in some places.)

the US first amendment protects against GOVERNMENTAL infringement.

in terms of this Twitter tempest-in-a-teapot, they ALSO have a right to free speech and Trumps demonstrably FALSE claims can absolutely be addressed, labeled as false, and that is an absolute right to free speech that Trump has already threatened with specious "governmental action" which PRECISELY violates both the letter and the spirit of the first amendment!

Trump is violating it!

I was referring to non-protected classes of people.

For example, I have the right to refuse to serve someone who has written bad checks at my establishment, for example.

Or I have the right to refuse service to someone who has caused harm to my clients.

Which leads back to my question: Should I be forced to serve these people?

> So is the suggestion that I should be forced to serve people I don't want to serve?

Well, yes. Like a utility company.

It doesn't matter who is hooked up to the water/sewer/internet/etc., they get service. I think the platform/publisher debate needs to actually be had.

Right now Twitter/FB/etc. are acting like publishers (silencing some, ignoring others) rather than platforms. If they are going to take responsibility for what is on their platform, they need to take full responsibility (a publisher). Or, they need to take no responsibility, as far as that goes under the law (a platform, which I here conflate with utility).

As it stands, all of the major social media companies are biased to the US left, and they cater largely to the left [0][1]. When they silence, they silence the US political right. Or comments that are critical of the CCCP[2]. Or legitimate medical opinions about Covid-19[3].

[0] https://dailycaller.com/2017/08/11/conservative-and-independ...

[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/social-media-companie...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/05/youtube-auto-del...

[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/youtube-facebook-spli...

It's not as crazy an idea as it sounds. You may already be forced to. You cannot not serve people based on a protected characteristic.

For example, I have the right to refuse to serve someone who has written bad checks at my establishment, for example.

Or I have the right to refuse service to someone who has caused harm to my clients.

(1) Private forum, displayed in the public. (2) Those rights protect your speech from being suppressed BY THE GOVERNMENT. (3) Correct if you meant legally as a private company running a private forum, they can manage the content as they see fit, including fact checking the POTUS. Or incorrect if you meant you have a legal right to exercise your speech on their platform free of their rules.

Well, a few other crowds did move to it but were quickly banned under the argument that their speech did not count as speech and thus wasn't protected. I remember it being quite a humorous (ironic?) twist for a company claiming to champion free speech.

You could have said the same thing about the press fifty or sixty years ago.

I just ctrl+f'd for "public forum" and yours was the first hit. One thing in particular I would like to comment on is that post-Trump's election I started listening to some of my SO's legal field podcasts because I wanted less sensational analysis. I very distinctly remember a series on the Opening Arguments one where they went into some depth about why Twitter should be legally considered a limited public-forum (this was in response to some other Trump-Twitter hubbub at the time).

So, just granting that, how does potentially being a "limited public forum" change it's rights and responsibilities to it's users? What about the heavy US government involvement in these companies, how could that change the analysis? What about the fact that dominate platforms are able to control the narrative due to that domination? Doesn't that completely fuck up the free speech concept? "Everyone uses X, but you can't because we don't like you, so you can have your free speech over there in that corner where nobody is." What kind of dangers in the long run does this present? Why do these companies so easily fall into models of censorship, and what kind of future would that mean for the public? (not looking to actually get into the convo necessarily, I'm commenting on the meta of the discussion and wish these kinds of questions were being asked more)

I personally hate youtubes banner for controversial shit. It always links to some shitty ass Wikipedia thats been heavily controlled/edited. Wikipedia is just not a good source of info on controversial topics, (though looking through revision history certainly can add context of what is "missing").

Considering they could log out (or open a private tab) and view the content, obviously it wasn't access to the information that was fundamental but the act of the President taking a step to reduce someone's access.

With that in mind, the underlying host taking a similar action is either a) Okay because it's their system? or b) Bad because they're blocking or altering the message?

We're in this really weird spot of free speech vs private property vs public forum vs free access vs..

Imagine a future president picks a Catholic forum to make the same sort of announcements that Trump currently does, specifically a catholic forum that bans any advocacy of pro-choice discussion. It is relatively easy to find a similar forum on any side of a modern hot button political issue.

Twitter's upcoming option to limit replies is being touted as a politician's dream, but in the US it's likely going to be unuseable for the same reason

If you're going to make legal nitpicks, you should probably have a thorough understanding of the jurisprudence.

And I wish you were right. That was how I always read it too but we've found out repeatedly - and recently - that state & local governments (and state universities) can ban numerous things, contrary to the 1st Amendment.