>Let's say that all of the major social media platforms ban any discussion of raising their taxes, or enacting more regulation on them, or let's say they straight up ban major politicians from the platform
Unless we're talking about a situation where a government controls the internet and makes it illegal for anyone but those social media sites to set up a server or host content, then that might create an immediate market demand for alternatives and those alternatives would appear, although alternatives would very likely already exist.
>Oh, and also there is no other significant competitor that matters, and it is unlikely that any competitors will pop up anytime soon.
You keep piling on qualifiers like "significant" and "serious" yet before social media silos it was entirely possible to reach millions of people and go viral with hosted forums and personal webpages. Hacker News alone gets a ton of traffic and it's hardly mainstream. What will happen is that the web will adapt as it always has.
It's not as big a problem as you make it out to be. Don't confuse the size of these sites' userbases with proportional degree of control over anything outside of their domain.
>Ok, now what is almost all of the major platforms do it, and there are no serious competitors?
>Let's expand this out even further. What if Walmart did the same thing? Along with multiple other grocery stores.
>You want to raise their taxes, well sorry, you probably aren't going to be able to buy food from any major grocery store.
(...)
>Your passive acceptance of this type of being can be extrapolated out to horrifying results.
Everything can be extrapolated out to horrifying results if you try hard enough and care little enough about reality. But your scenario in which every social media site (including those hosted in other countries,) and every businesses and government utilities and services conspire to control all forms of communication and deprive people of basic services as a means of oppression is so far removed from any conceivable reality that I have to question whether you're commenting in good faith. Otherwise, you're doing a good job of making my point for me.