Twitter Permanently Suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Account

Censorship is censorship even when it is not done by the government. I am not sure what point you’re making here. Leaving that aside, I would say this is actually also, in part, an action by the government. Glenn Greenwald has written extensively about this (https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-and-media-do-not-...) but the summary is that private companies seeking favor with the current administration are incentivized to take actions that grant the sitting government power, in order to avoid undesired scrutiny or legislative action.

> This is not the poster case for trying to prove tech has too much power.

It absolutely is. There is no reason to take an action like this unless there is power in that action. There’s no negative harm to Twitter in terms of user retention or advertiser attractiveness from having Rep Greene stay on their platform. The reason Twitter’s biased employees and leaders are taking such actions is because they know it will meaningfully impact Rep Greene’s ability to be heard, which favors their politics and ideology. They have that power because Twitter, like most of big tech, is too big and is too shielded from competition due to network effects. Twitter is a telecom utility service, nothing more. It needs to be regulated just like we regulate power utilities or telecom companies.

> There's a long list of marginalized people suspended for no good reason who don't get to whine about it on C-SPAN or through their press office.

Ah yes, everyone who is unjustly censored by a private cabal of hyper-powerful tech companies is “whining”. You know full well that alternate channels don’t have the same visibility or reach, so this is a facile argument, even leaving aside your pejorative framing of those who are against censorship.

Open protocols should be the default. We have W3C recommendations that make the federated social web possible.

I agree.

> the audience will move if necessary.

If we let that be the plan, then our filter bubble problem will get even worse. Everyone left of a certain point will only be on Twitter, and everyone else will only be on the fediverse. It's a lot less likely that people will follow anyone they disagree with if they'd need another account they couldn't otherwise use.

More specifically, most of the examples at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_censorship seem to be ones where a company exercised its First Amendment right of free association.

One of the examples is when the Dixie Chicks were blacklisted by country radio stations. Surely stations have a First Amendment right to decide to not broadcast songs from a given group, especially when most of the the owners, staff, advertisers, and listeners don't want to hear them.

Another example is when Sinclair Broadcast Group decided to not broadcast Nightline's list of the US soldiers who had died in Iraq. Surely that too was an exercise of Sinclair's right of free association, this time based on their belief that Nightline stepped too far from news into politicizing.

I don't even see how Amazon's ban on preorders of Captain America: The Winter Soldier in disc form can be called 'censorship' - it looks like normal predatory business practices which Disney should be familiar with. (Disney's own self-censorship of Song of the South would be another example of the oddity of extending the concept of "censorship" outside of the political realm.)

To be certain, the examples where a company acted due to concerns about political consequences are censorship. But that's the "normal" government censorship, simply mediated through private organizations.

I completely agree that free association is NOT an absolute right for companies! There is a tension with the rights of others, as with US civil rights laws that prohibit companies that do business with the public from discriminating on the basis of race, religion, etc.

But, what's the tension here?

If Twitter doesn't want to be associated with Greene, well, there's a long history of publishing companies, broadcast stations, newspapers, and more, who have decided to not be associated with someone. After all, that's the essence of free association.

> absolutely no recourse

Exaggeration like that seems a bit of a trite diversion/straw man. Very few of us plebians have "absolutely no recourse". You can hold a sign and protest on the street corner, or print out fliers and pass them out, or go door-to-door.

Those aren't as effective as being Robert Murdoch, but we can't all be media moguls.

What would be OK to you, and also not be unconstitutional? (Or, what amendment would you want?)

Followup question: If I don't agree to Twitter's Terms of Service, and no other service can provide any where to the same recourse as Twitter, can those terms I disagree to be nullified?