> Yeah, that's true of every nation in existence and every nation in the past. We just happen to live in a relatively peaceful time. Not too long ago, constant war and fighting for territory was all there was, and there wasn't a square mile on planet earth that blood hasn't been spilt for.

Cruz is a part of the US government so my statement was about that government but it is of course applicable to all governments.

> Twitter is a monopoly and has an outsized influence on politics and news today, beyond any media force in history, perhaps.

No, Twitter is not a monopoly. Nobody is forced to use Twitter and nobody is prevented from competing with Twitter. The same is not true for the US government which Cruz is a part of.

> They're protected by arbitrary legislation from the 90s that prevents them from being held accountable for false or defamatory statements from getting published and shared on their platform.

Section 230 is no more arbitrary than any other legislation. It doesn't protect Twitter any more than it protects its competitors or anyone else who publishes contend uploaded by other people. Section 230 provides the same type of protection as the first or second amendment, protection from the government.

> The whole impetus from that protection was to promote free speech.

Then it has achieved its objective as it would be much more difficult for anyone (except maybe massive corporations) to publish user generated content without section 230.

> Instead, Twitter has chosen to arbitrarily and selectively mute, shadow ban, lock out, and silence those who they disagree with.

It's their servers. They have no obligation to host anything on them.

> I think if they are benefitting from 230 protection, they should not be allowed to engage in this kind of manipulation. Or they should be forced to federate their service with other platforms.

Force is not an appropriate response. Why don't you delete your Twitter account and setup an account with a competing service? Then you can advocate for other people to do the same thing voluntarily instead of advocating for force and coercion.

> With Twitter, individual contributors can spend a decade building up a following of tens of thousands to millions of users, and then with a click, Twitter can take that away.

You should never have used Twitter in the first place if that was a requirement. Twitter doesn't offer that security but mastodon does so you can use that instead. Other people don't have an obligation to cater to your preferences and it's wrong to force them to do that. Twitter does however allow you to pin a tweet with a link to your mastodon account so I suggest you do that if you still have a Twitter account.

> I mean, I'm old enough to remember when we got the right to keep your phone number passed so that you can keep your number when you switch cell phone carriers. That sort of thing does not exist in social media. If I switch platforms, I lose my ability to communicate with my connections. That's a problem. That should be legislated away.

No, force is not the answer to non-violent problems. Please explore peaceful and voluntary solutions to your problems before imposing your will on others.