The title and content of the post implies that we should regard private censorship with the same concern as we do government censorship, regardless of the current legal framework. Which I don't necessarily disagree with. In fact, I think most people here are on the same page of: it sucks big time when a company like Facebook can unilaterally decide that the famous Napalm Girl photo should not be displayed.
So where's the argument? Where's the discussion? Forgive me, but I don't find the above assertion interesting to discuss when virtually everyone agrees with it. The actual topic of interest is: how can we prevent Facebook from making such decisions over its own platform?
That's a pretty big question with a lot of angles. So I chose, for the sake of argument, to focus on what the parent commenter highlighted, because its specious premise raises issues with the author's overall premise:
> For instance, if you’re a journalist and you want to promote your work, there is simply no viable alternative to Twitter at the moment. No other microblogging platform comes even close to having the number of users Twitter does, and most of the alternatives are hotbeds of extremism, so that anyone who joins them is thereby disqualified in polite company.
In the history of our society there has never been free or equal channels of promotion, i.e. advertising or being featured in mainstream media. It has always been the case that if you didn't pay, or otherwise get noticed by mainstream media, you were unheard and/or considered to be part of a "hotbed of extremism".
So I ask of the author (and those who agree with him), if you want to argue that Facebook/Twitter should be compelled to not censor, then what sense does it make to assert people (journalists are not) have a right (legal or moral) to have their self-promotion be noticed, when that precedent does not exist? Moreover, it's just a flawed premise because I can think of journalists big (e.g. at the NYT) and small (e.g. former students of mine) who have paid careers in journalism without being active on Twitter. I contend that this is not just quibbling over minor facts, but an example of how the author's argument only makes sense by ignoring details of how the world actually works.
What does this one point have to do with the article's overall premise? He wants our society to change in a significant way, but he neither accepts the legal consequences that would follow, nor proposes an alternative framework that would be feasible. I don't disagree with that Big Tech Censorship is of huge concern. But I believe that if we want to change this status quo, we'd have to agree to give the government greater powers to regulate private industry and wealth individuals. The author doesn't want to grant this, rendering this entire discussion to be an inane impotent exercise.