Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

> We have generally acknowledged that things that are important to everyone and are monopolized need to be regulated.

Social media is not important, it's an entertainment triviality on par with online gaming. Further, big tech does not monopolize online communication by any definition of the word, twitter and facebook are one of many thousands of ways to communicate online, and most internet users use a variety of platforms as using one does not preclude the ability to use another. Additionally, I'm not saying these companies shouldn't be regulated, check my reply in the sibling thread, what I'm opposed to is the violation of property and first amendment rights by forcing these companies to pay for hosting content they disagree with.

>Social media is practically the only effective way to participate in the global community

Totally false. The "global community" such that it exists on the internet is spread across many hundreds of thousands of applications, sites, and communities.

> they now have to deal with the implications of being the keepers of public discourse,

No, your reasoning here is completely backwards. The fraction of people who willingly choose to participate in public discourse on these sites have to deal with the implications of choosing to use such sites. There are many alternative options available.

> It's a little ironic to argue that booting people off of their platform increases competition and then mention their new competitor that was immediately wiped off the face of the internet.

No. Parler moved to a new hosting platform called Epik the same one that hosts Gab and others, this is a business opportunity for Epik created by the fact that AWS did not want to do business with Parler, this reduces AWS's dominance in the market.

> it's also a reflection that Twitter has so dominated the marketplace that your only customers as a new social media site are going to be nutjobs.

Not true. The reason that Parler attracts extremists is because it was designed to attract them. There are many other platforms that don't have this issue

> The community is a huge part of a social media site

Social media sites do not own the community, they can visit as few or as many different social media sites as they want and its trivial for them to do so.

> Because there is no meaningful competitor.

Totally false. Discord, tiktok, mastadon, pinterest, twitch, vimeo, tumblr, irc, medium, soundcloud, wordpress, blogger ete and that's just off the top of my head.

> Because your friends and family want to use Twitter, and probably won't switch, so you have to use Twitter and Facebook.

That doesn't matter. If your friends use a platform that you want to use then follow the rules of the platform and you'll have no problem. A lot of my friends communicate over Steam chat, that doesn't mean Valve owes me anything - it's an entertainment triviality.

> Because Facebook and Twitter have spent so long maximizing engagement that people barely bother looking for other sources of news and information.

This is false, but even if it were true, anyone who gets their information exclusively from social media is to blame for their own media consumption habits.

Why not? Twitter is a private company and should be allowed to decide whoever they want to do business with or don't... and should be able to decide what content they want to keep or remove on the computers they pay for and show (or hide) to/from anyone they wish, as long as the content is legal.

Similarly, Amazon should be allowed to terminate any of their relationships with any of the clients and remove their data and applications from their servers.

As can HN can make my comments inaccessible to the masses with whatever pretend "rules" they claim to apply to me... or ban me completely.

Users who pay for their computers should be able to run any application and keep any data they want on the hardware they purchase and own or share it with others, as long as they're not sharing licenced content or private information or such.

So, instead of trying to after Twitter or Facebook or Google, we should go after companies like Apple. Why is Apple allowed to deny users the right to run any application that want on the hardware they purchase? THAT should be illegal.

While Twitter can push out people, someone else like Gab can take them in. While Parler shuts down, Gab keeps going.

If ICANN went after these companies and terminated their domains or ISPs went after them and took away their internet, we could move to distributed internet today, which will make companies like Twitter irrelevant. The biggest threat to that is being presented by hardware and OS vendors making it practically impossible to run the software infrastructure required for running or consuming such an internet.