by ben_w | 2026-03-04 14:33:33+00:00
> Network effects aren't laws. It isn't illegal or impossible to leave Twitter - millions of people have already done it.

Irrelevant. They have the impact of making it difficult to leave. (Conversely, the more who do, the easier it gets for the rest to leave; if Musk cared about money from the platform, this would be an important concern, as the hysteresis slows initial departures, but when enough damage is done they can't mend their relationship with their customers by undoing just whatever happened to be the metaphorical last straw which broke the metaphorical camel's back).

> If you don't trust the American government's influence on Twitter - and you shouldn't - why would you trust your own?

The point is, that government influence is always present. Pretending they're actually independent is a fig-leaf to deflect blame while allowing censorship anyway. If you force the same laws that apply to the government to also apply to these organisations, if you let Twitter (and Facebook, and all the others) face the same consequences that the government would face, that means they are as limited in what they can censor as the government itself is.

> Hate speech laws are well and good until opposing your government's involvement in genocide gets classified as hate speech.

Is an additional problem, yes. And yet, in its absence, you can get banned without recourse, without trial even, from all the private sites for the same.

Consider: If you have a democratic right to talk to your representative, and that representative decides to only make themselves available over ${insert network here}, then ${that network} banning your account has the same effect as that representative banning you, only without any court able to order them to re-enable access for your democratic rights. Previous link to judgement regarding Trump and Twitter amounts to this, even though in that case it was Trump doing the blocking rather than Twitter.

The absence of government intervention does not help, it creates a power vacuum in which the same problem exists without democratic oversight.

> I don't know, but if so the problem there again is the government's own corruption not the platform's right to free speech. Powerful influential people have used the media to influence elections and sway voters ever since mass media made it possible. That is arguably a fundamental and necessary part of the democratic process.

If corruption is a "fundamental and necessary part of the democratic process", that's not a democracy, it's somewhere in the space of oligarchy, nepotism, kleptocracy, and aristocracy. Of course, no system is pure anything, but the point is that this isn't putting the δημο into "democracy".

Many countries, amusingly including the USA, have rules on silence right before an election; some recent electoral weirdness has been attributed to social media violating this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_silence

> What exactly can Twitter do to me on Hacker News? Or in my own home? Nothing, legally.

Sue you personally for your free speech for saying Musk's (in your words) "an asshole", and that his was the "kind of behavior ruins the value of his platform". Which ought to be protected free speech, may be legally protected in theory, but can you afford even just enough lawyers to get an anti-SLAPP against him? Some organisations have closed down because they could not.

It can promote propaganda that fuels a mob hell-bent on overthrowing your government while censoring anyone trying to organise against it.

What's that saying, "your freedom to swing your stops at the end of my nose"? Same applies here. His freedom to decide who is and isn't allowed to say what on his platform ends the moment it becomes censorship itself.