Morphy wrote on Jan 11
th, 2021 at 1:22pm:
Regardless what people believe about Trump if Twitter can ban him no one is safe. Which is fine if it was a normal company. But these social media platforms are the modern day Gutenberg press. Since few people read things like newspapers any more banning someone from social media is like being excommunicated from humanity. And that's only going to become more true .
I think this is a really interesting issue. There is no traditional freedom of speech issue since of course private website X is not compelled to host person A. Especially if person A breaks their rules, acts irresponsibly/whatever. In theory X can be as politically discriminatory as it wishes, for example it could be a group for only registered members of some political party. However, trying to remain neutral whilst also policing your platform is nearly impossible in my view.
The issue comes with how all encompassing and monopolistic these websites/social media platforms are in the realm of communication. As such having social media privileges revoked is a pretty serious penalty for a public person and can greatly reduce your communication bandwidth. This gives a lot of power to control and direct what is acceptable conversation.
An interesting point with Trump is that he leaned into Twitter far more than any other nation leader. If he had been more traditional and used press briefings then Twitter wouldn't have nearly as much power over him. Then again, he wouldn't have been able to use the power of Twitter to communicate with his base.