It'll be interesting to see if the people who've been lauding musk for his supposedly pro free speech attitudes will reckon with what's been happening in actuality, or if they'll just accept this as "freedom for me but not for thee".
Hopefully this makes more people aware of just how much power social media companies have, and have always had, over the public discourse and that results in the institution of legal and/or technical measures that limit that power across the board. I'm not optimistic though, given how much of the public attention right now seems to be focused on admonishing Elon personally rather than on the overall system that makes this kind of censorship possible.
What do you think this system is?
1. A small number of large tech companies have collectively managed to gain a huge amount of control over what information millions of people are allowed to see.
2. There are nearly no legal restrictions on how they're allowed to exercise that control.
I'm not sure precisely what the solution to that should be, but the problem only exists as long as both 1 and 2 remain true, so you could theoretically approach the problem from either of those angles, or both.
As for whether or not their should be legal restrictions on what publishers can publish... take your best shot at suggesting some legal rules. I think there would be holes that you could drive a truck through that would upset you regardless of your own views.
Not everyone needs a global megaphone. And nobody intrinisicly deserves one.
That may have been poorly phrased on my part. My intent was to put the focus on the listener rather than the speaker, since Google search (for example) doesn't control what people say, but it can control what people see. Censorship at that level is just as much of an issue as it is at the level of social media. "Freedom of speech" and "freedom to listen" are really the same thing. I prefer the term "the free exchange of ideas" since that includes both speech and listening, is agnostic to the medium (listening, reading etc.), and conveniently excludes things like CSAM and spam, since those aren't ideas.
I'd also argue you can't "just go somewhere else" to find content you aren't even aware exists in the first place, so I think the phrasing "allowed to see" makes more sense than you give it credit for once you consider the chilling effect of widespread censorship.
That sounds like a big jump even beyond "they shouldn't be able to control what they publish." Are we now going to require Twitter actively promote everything too?
How many obligations would you impose on everyone else in service of this hypothetical listener who demands to be spoon fed all points of view in the world without effort? Is a library allowed to have a collection if they don't fully advertise it's breadth? Is a bookstore allowed to choose what to and to not put on their shelves? Am I allowed to tell you what I think without telling you how many possible other views there are? Any of those are just as "chilling" as "twitter.com" not having all the content that "elonsjet.com" or "jacobin.com" or "foxnews.com" would...
Twitter/FB/etc are HARDLY important enough, and way less powerful than past media, to start telling people they have to amplify what other people say.