Twitter deserves credit for creating their platform, absolutely. They created a platform where everyday people can interact with top media and politicians.
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 fear letting the government regulate twitter more than I fear twitter deciding my politics aren’t acceptable. I can leave Twitter, but creating a back door for the government to regulate political speech has consequences that stretch much further than Twitter itself.
I'm not talking about the government regulating speech, I'm talking about the government regulating against Twitter deciding your politics are unacceptable. Whatever they may be. More speech.
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.
Giving the government the explicit ability to enumerate what speech is and is not worthy of protection from Twitter is not a very pro free speech idea. It does not take a large amount of imagination to see how the ability to decide what speech must be carried can be easily abused by the government.
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.
I mean, they already enumerate that child porn isn't allowed, but kitten pictures are. We're just negotiating the boundaries. I'm advocating for the widest possible boundaries, because I think it creates the least possibility for the selective abuse that you're worried about.
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'.
> I mean, they already enumerate that child porn isn't allowed, but kitten pictures are.
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
I'm suggesting that Twitter might be a monopoly in the field of "being the watering hole for the entire media/political class". The argument hinges on network effects, I'm not saying it's ironclad, 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.
If that's the case, the common carrier concept is helpfully already fleshed out for us in the law.
> I'm not talking about protected speech, or the first amendment.
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.
I know I already said good night, but you haven't engaged with that common carrier concept at all. Check it out.
We've been through all of this already with Ma Bell.
I didn't bother, because the concept of "common carrier" is an extremely poor fit for what you're looking for.
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.
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?