The problem here is that you don't have an account on Twitter and yet you are certain in your knowledge of what's on Twitter. You're not an American, and yet you're certain in your knowledge of how the U.S. First Amendment is applied and what U.S. monopoly laws are and what their basis is. And you're simply wrong. Please provide, for example, an example of someone calling for genocide on Twitter that was not removed by Twitter and we can all go look at today?First of all you're assuming all kinds of wrong things about me. I'm not Christian, conservative or a trump supporter. And I'm not American either (thank goodness)
Big Tech companies - fair enough I did not use the word monopoly correctly.
However, these companies:
a) have huge market share
b) have a strong network effect
c) have a lot of power which they are abusing (size absolutely matters here)
d) all collude with eachother on who they ban from their platforms, which makes them collectively very much like a monopoly from the point of view of the banned, I guess you call this a cartel.
e) absolutely anti competitive, did you forget the context of this thread? They blocked Parler from competing with them. Not only took away their hosting, but also kicked them off the app stores which actually are real monopolies for their own hardware. I suppose Parler should just build their own phone and app store too? Get real please.
Regarding speech, the fact that obscenity, porn and gore is considered free speech in america is a relatively recent phenomenon. For most of the history it was not considered speech and there was no issue with censoring it. This seems perfectly reasonable to me. The most convincing arguments for why free speech is important don't even apply to those things, so calling them free speech was an extreme stretch to begin with.
The analogy to Fox or NYT doesn't work. They publish curated news, they don't provide a service where people can voice their opinions (like twitter and facebook do). If FOX was selling time slots on their channels and they refused to sell to certain people, then you might have a point. This is the same conflation you did with the BLM protest and grocery store. If it was a business of providing protest spaces, and they refused to cater to BLM, then the analogy would make sense.
So you're concerned about anti black or pro hitler speech. Well twitter and facebook explicitly allow anti white racism and anti male sexism all over their platforms. You can literally call for genocide on twitter and it's perfectly fine, as long as you're targeting the approved group. Are you concerned about that too or are you a hypocrite? What is your proposed solution?
Indeed I'm not discriminated against on twitter, because I have never had an account. However claiming that conservatives aren't discriminated against there just makes you sound completely out of touch with reality. The evidence for it is overwhelming. Even the CEO has acknowledged that they have a liberal bias. Like many SV companies they are overrun by progressive/SJW employees so it's perfectly logical and expected for them to discriminate unless they are forced not to.
Regarding your examples like the strip club and tobacco ads. So what? If those things are legal, then there is no problem. Provide the service that you claim to provide, without discrimination. If there's truly some kind of exceptional case then legislate it. (I highly doubt tech companies will get such legislated exception to discriminate against their political opponents.)
There are already real world examples of banks denying people the ability to open accounts because of their politics. It is just isolated incidents so far, but it is not that much of a stretch to grocery stores or anything else, if your kind of thinking continues to gain traction.
So I am curious now, since you seem to be so pro-discrimination. Do you also favor allowing discrimination based on race, religion, sexuality etc? If not, why? what is the fundamental difference here?
And let's talk about the First Amendment. You first say that all "legal" speech should be allowed on any platform that allows speech. Then, when it's pointed out to you that a lot of things you think are reprehensible and would effectively destroy the ability of the rest of us to use social media if allowed are in fact legal, you decide to come up with your own definition of "legal" based on some fuzzy past timeline. And that's the problem when you start to impose government control on speech, which make no mistake is exactly what you're proposing. Our constitution is pretty protective of letting the courts decide what currently is and isn't covered under the First Amendment, not you.
And on to one more thing you seem to think you understand but clearly do not, the tech industry (yes, I run a software company in the energy business so I think I do understand it at least a bit). First you seem to think that Amazon competes with Parler? And Google and Apple? Perhaps Twitter competes with Parler, but they didn't have anything to do with Parler getting kicked off AWS and the app stores unless you want to start with some unsupported right wing conspiracy theory at which point conversation over. If Google and Apple don't compete with Parler, it isn't anti-competitive for them to remove them from their app stores for violating contractual terms they legally agreed to. Secondly you don't seem to grasp just how many web hosting companies exist or how easy it is to set up your own servers. There was absolutely nothing but laziness and lack of basic technical knowledge to stop Parler from setting up their own server, you need to either provide some evidence that isn't true or acknowledge it. Your whole anti-competitive argument falls down when you acknowledge there were plenty of alternatives for Parler or in the cases where there weren't the companies weren't competing with Parler and had nothing to gain by enforcing their terms on them. The only idea you proposed with any merit revolves around network effects. That's completely novel anti-trust territory there, so it will be interesting how the courts interpret existing law or legislators decide to impose new laws around that. At least you now realize the fundamental difference between an electric or gas utility and a web hosting provider, I hope.
I think you must be willfully missing my point on the ability of a business to decide who they do business with. You really think its OK that Trump Tower in NYC should be forced to rent the entire bottom floor out to a strip club even if that destroys the value of the other 57 floors of existing and potential tenants who value an office space significantly less if the ground level is a strip club? If yes, then I have to ask at this point, how many businesses have you started and run exactly?
And I find your grocery store and bank examples interesting. On the one hand, you insist that my examples of what people do in grocery stores that get them kicked out aren't valid because they're not related to the grocery store's core business. In other words, you think it's OK for the grocery store to kick out someone for engaging in "legal" speech inside the store because it's purpose is not to provide a platform for speech. So you're saying a grocery story can choose which customers they serve as long as the basis of that choice isn't around their core business of selling groceries? Except in the case of espousing conservative beliefs, then it's not OK? You're internally contradicting yourself there, don't you think?
To answer your question on race, sex, age, sexual orientation... those aren't things one chooses (I don't really support the ban on discrimination on the basis of religion and in fact religious organizations are allowed to blatantly discriminate when hiring). If you choose to be an asshole who wants to overthrow democracy in the United States then I should most certainly, as someone who dedicated more than 20 years of blood sweat and tears defending that, be allowed to discriminate against you when you try to use my business to push those views.
