I feel confident that 1 in 10 Americans is more people than lived in the aforementioned company town. The relevant market isn't "America" but rather that audience on Twitter. Can you reach some of the same people via Facebook? Perhaps. But not all of them. And my suspicion is that the number you can't is still quite a lot larger than the number of people who lived in that company town.
That's not how that works. The point was that 10 in 10 Americans in that town had to follow the private company's restrictions because they controlled the entire town.
What you're saying has nothing to do with the analogy GP was making which was that the private company had a monopoly on sidewalks in the town, but Twitter doesn't control all of the sidewalks in town, it controls about 10% of them. And even if the aggregation of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Discord run about 90% of the sidewalks, those companies are all independent of each other and have their own business models and content moderation policies. Plus, new sidewalks are being built all the time. Discord and Reddit have grown in popularity vastly in more recent years, at what point do we add new companies into this tangled analogy, or take them out?
> What you're saying has nothing to do with the analogy GP was making which was that the private company had a monopoly on sidewalks in the town, but Twitter doesn't control all of the sidewalks in town, it controls about 10% of them.
They control 10% of the sidewalks in the country. That's way more than the company town ever did -- it's hundreds of towns worth of sidewalks.
And you as a speaker can't use the Facebook sidewalks instead of Twitter unless they had all the same people walking on them (e.g. were part of the same federated system), which they're not. If you want to reach your entire audience, you have to use both at once. Twitter can evict you from an audience bigger than Texas with no other way to reach them, and your argument is that a monopoly on Texas is only 10% of the country.
Yeah you're really not getting this. I'm not trying to be rude but you seem to not be understanding what I mean at all.
>Twitter can evict you from an audience bigger than Texas with no other way to reach them, and your argument is that a monopoly on Texas is only 10% of the country.
That's not my argument at all, the argument is that if the private company had only owned 10% of the sidewalks in town, the court would have ruled that they had every right to tell her to distribute her materials elsewhere(it explicitly says this was the reasoning behind their decision). It was only because one private corporation literally had a monopoly on sidewalks in the town that the court saw differently.
>And you as a speaker can't use the Facebook sidewalks instead of Twitter unless they had all the same people walking on them
But they do have the same people walking on them...
>If you want to reach your entire audience, you have to use both at once.
This is a bit of a catch-22, no? Your 'entire audience' is everyone that you can reach. If Twitter objects to your content, they can bar you from their (relatively small, to point out the analogy again) share of 'sidewalks', but there are still a vast number of other sidewalks 'in town' that you can advertise on.
>Twitter can evict you from an audience bigger than Texas with no other way to reach them
Who are these people that Twitter denies access to the rest of the internet? You are perfectly capable of reaching anyone who uses Twitter through another social media service, or setting up your own website/newsletter/Discord channel/podcast/blog/etc.
> But they do have the same people walking on them...
I think this is the part you're not getting. The set of people who use Twitter is not a strict subset of the set of people who use Facebook. There are people who use Twitter and not Facebook or vice versa. A large number of people.
> This is a bit of a catch-22, no? Your 'entire audience' is everyone that you can reach.
Not at all. Your 'entire audience' is everybody everywhere. If a given platform has a monopoly over any subset of people, they have a monopoly. Some people use Twitter and Facebook and Reddit, and none of them have a monopoly over that subset of people, but some people use only Twitter. And if Twitter was federated (like email) this wouldn't happen at all, because there would be no users exclusive to Twitter since you could reach all the same users using any other provider of the federated protocol.
> If Twitter objects to your content, they can bar you from their (relatively small, to point out the analogy again) share of 'sidewalks', but there are still a vast number of other sidewalks 'in town' that you can advertise on.
Which, again, the same people don't walk down, so you can no longer speak to them.
> You are perfectly capable of reaching anyone who uses Twitter through another social media service, or setting up your own website/newsletter/Discord channel/podcast/blog/etc.
You're saying that the company town doesn't deny you from speaking to anyone on the sidewalks of another town, so you can just have the people you want to speak to go to another town and speak to them there. The obvious problem in this case being that the network effect prevents people from doing this. You would have to convince everyone to move at once or hardly anyone does.
Sure I guess, you keep telling me I'm not getting it and then misrepresenting what I'm saying so I'm just going to assume you either don't understand or are just having a conversation in bad faith.
I guess your argument is 'your audience is literally everyone and if someone refuses to use a service besides Twitter you should be legally obliged to reach that person even if Twitter wishes to remove your content from it's platform for violations of their content moderation policy', which is absolutely insane to me.
>You're saying that the company town doesn't deny you from speaking to anyone on the sidewalks of another town,
That isn't what I'm saying _at all_, so I guess we're done here.
>If a given platform has a monopoly over any subset of people, they have a monopoly.
Also, I have to stress that this is just wrong. You just said 'Twitter has a monopoly over the subset of Americans that use Twitter exclusively' but it _doesnt_. Those users can choose to access your content on Facebook, Reddit, email, or anywhere else _with no obstruction_.
> Those users can choose to access your content on Facebook, Reddit, email, or anywhere else _with no obstruction_.
The network effect is the obstruction. It's a medium for discussion. You're on Twitter, having a conversation with a set of specific individuals. Some of them disagree with you and you are trying to convince them of your position. You are responding to public claims that they made about you.
Now Twitter decides that you're guilty of crimethink and you are invited to start your own website. But who is going to go there? The things you write there don't appear in anyone's feed as a rebuttal to the dubious claims being made against you on Twitter. If one person shows up to engage with you, they find no community and no multi-party discussion happening there, so they leave, and so does the next person.
And the people making the dubious claims against you are happy to see you go and have no reason to follow, because now they can preach to their audience of millions without encountering any criticism from anyone who disagrees with them. Meanwhile someone builds anti-Twitter which has all the same problems but a different political alignment, exacerbating the polarization of the country by preventing anyone from engaging with anyone who doesn't share the same set of preconceived notions, because both sites ban anyone who disagrees with The Preferred Party and there is nowhere that people with genuine disagreements can hash them out without one of them getting booted.
I feel confident that 1 in 10 Americans is more people than lived in the aforementioned company town. The relevant market isn't "America" but rather that audience on Twitter. Can you reach some of the same people via Facebook? Perhaps. But not all of them. And my suspicion is that the number you can't is still quite a lot larger than the number of people who lived in that company town.