monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

twitter is a privately owned platform

ultimately they decide who has access

When FoxNews give me my own regular 30 minute show I'll start thinking that this is a free speech issue.

When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar; you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.

(...)

“We understand the desire to permanently suspend him now,” Kate Ruane, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a statement on Friday. “But it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions — especially when political realities make those decisions easier.”

(...)

No serious thinker believes that Twitter and Facebook, as private companies, are obligated to give any user a platform, just as no one doubts that a restaurant owner can boot an unruly diner for causing a scene. But there are legitimate questions about whether a small handful of unelected tech executives, accountable only to their boards and shareholders (and, in Mr. Zuckerberg’s case, to neither) should wield such enormous power. These actions also raise longer-term questions, such as whether the business models of social media companies are fundamentally compatible with a healthy democracy, or whether a generation of Twitter-addicted politicians can ever be untaught the lesson that racking up retweets is a surer path to power than governing responsibly.

WASHINGTON — When Simon & Schuster canceled its plans this week to publish Senator Josh Hawley’s book, he called the action “a direct assault on the First Amendment.”

And when Twitter permanently banned President Trump’s account on Friday, his family and his supporters said similar things. “We are living Orwell’s 1984,” Donald Trump Jr. said — on Twitter. “Free-speech no longer exists in America.”

The companies’ decisions may have been unwise, scholars who study the First Amendment said, but they were perfectly lawful. That is because the First Amendment prohibits government censorship and does not apply to decisions made by private businesses.

It is certainly possible to violate the values embodied in the First Amendment without violating the First Amendment itself. But the basic legal question could hardly be more straightforward, said RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah. And, she said, it should not have been lost on Mr. Hawley, who graduated from Yale Law School and served as a law clerk to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

“It’s become popular — even among those who plainly know better — to label all matters restricting anyone’s speech as a ‘First Amendment issue,’” she said. “But the First Amendment limits only government actors, and neither a social media company nor a book publisher is the government. Indeed, they enjoy their own First Amendment rights not to have the government require them to associate with speech when they prefer not to do so.”

But many in the legal community were nonetheless uneasy about the developments, which underscored the enormous power of a handful of social media companies that are largely insulated from accountability and may change positions on what speech is acceptable as executives come and go.

“I want a wide range of ideas, even those I loathe, to be heard, and I think Twitter especially holds a concerning degree of power over public discourse,” said Gregory P. Magarian, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

But Professor Magarian said the president and Mr. Hawley were in particularly poor positions to complain.

“The First Amendment doesn’t require any private forum to publish anyone’s speech,” he said. “Neither Twitter nor Simon & Schuster has any obligations under the First Amendment.” He added: “Any suggestion that people like Trump and Hawley, and the viewpoints they espouse, will ever lack meaningful access to public attention is ludicrous. We should worry about private power over speech, but presidents and senators are the last speakers we need to worry about.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, too, said the free speech interests involved in suspending Mr. Trump’s Twitter account were complicated.

“We understand the desire to permanently suspend him now, but it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions,” said Kate Ruane, an A.C.L.U. lawyer. “President Trump can turn to his press team or Fox News to communicate with the public, but others — like the many Black, brown and L.G.B.T.Q. activists who have been censored by social media companies — will not have that luxury.”

Mr. Hawley’s book, titled “The Tyranny of Big Tech,” was to have been published in June. In canceling it, Simon & Schuster said that “it will always be our mission to amplify a variety of voices and viewpoints” but that Mr. Hawley had crossed a line in light of “the disturbing, deadly insurrection that took place on Wednesday in Washington.”

“We take seriously our larger public responsibility as citizens,” the company said, “and cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat to our democracy and freedom.”

The publisher was free to make that decision, legal experts said, but that does not mean it was the right one.

Amazon is removing Nazi chat site Parler from it’s web hosting site.

Robrt has been so generous in frequently providing "all expense paid vacations" fromA2k for "special people" (who try to tank polite discourse with vile and often totally insane diversions).

They can make their own servers if they want.

...several companies are refusing to sell web hosting services to a third party not involved in the events of Jan. 6, in order to silence one or more of their customers who they disagree with.

If you cannot see the many illegal/unconstitutional problems with this, we're just fucked.

I wonder how this crowd would have felt about the signers of the Declaration of Independence?