I don't know who needs to hear this, but if a company suspends a member of the government who has a budget and staff for PR as a function of serving as a member of that government, then that person has not in any meaningful way been censored by the government. This is not the poster case for trying to prove tech has too much power. 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.
TBH, I think that is a bit of a trite diversion/straw man. I don't think anyone is arguing this is an act by the government. However, censorship is not always something government does [1]. This certainly _is_ an act of corporate political censorship.
And if they can easily get away with censoring people who "get to whine about it on C-SPAN", it is certain that you and I and the rest of the plebeians have absolutely no recourse. That is not OK.
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?
How many times a year do you watch C-SPAN? How often do you browse the press release page for your local elected official, much less someone else's? Whatever you think of this particular Congresswoman, Twitter is one of the largest and most influential outreach platforms. It's like getting banned from radio in the 1940s and saying, "Who cares? There's still newsletters and speaking engagements." Getting banned from Twitter is a big deal for people who engage with mass audiences.
She still has her congressional account. This is only her personal account.
edit to add: That said, she can say things on C-SPAN that would get the congressional account suspended too (see: Trump hopping accounts as they got suspended after the initial ban). And those things would be reported by people who can do so under the cover of reporting, so it's not like she has any less reach for the goofballery now.
> It's like getting banned from radio in the 1940s
It'd be like getting banned from one station, perhaps. Radio? To my knowledge the FCC has never banned anyone from the airwaves.
This pretense that the big social networks are so big that politicians must be granted access is just poisonous beyond belief to what the internet is. No one is stopping MTG from setting up countless points of her own presence, or sharing links to MTG-related media on Twitter.
Alas, that getting banned from one of the big networks is a crude, de-facto facsimile to a truth is quite the sad sign of the state of affairs. That we have become so very centralized, that our primary way of connecting is via such heavily centralized pillars that hold up so very much of the online experience is nothing short of a travesty. I mainly try to calm myself by reminding myself how recent all this is, how new. And assuring myself of their inability to create new & visionary ways of connecting; the big networks are beholden to their experience as massified, consumerized, common experiences. Their own impermissiveness, their own slowly closing, setting ever more fast in concrete rules & expectations bring hope that the frontier & more open communications might rise again.
> It's like getting banned from radio in the 1940s and saying, "Who cares? There's still newsletters and speaking engagements."
It's more like getting banned from one radio station in the 1940s and going "Who cares? She can still go on a bunch of other radio stations, and most people are capable of tuning in, if they want to."
She's on Facebook. She's on Gab. She's on Parler. She's on Gettr. She went on a cross-country tour last year. She appears on TV and will probably get even more TV appearances out of this. Anyone who wants to hear whatever she's saying has their choice of outlets from which to do so.
Facebook has a habit of politically motivated bans too, so she'll probably get banned from there next just like everyone else has. And Gab and Parler have a really hard time getting users since Google banned them from the Play Store (and I think Apple did the same), so it's disingenuous to pretend that they're equivalents to Twitter.
I don't think "everyone else" has been banned from Facebook; aside from Trump, I can't think of any other American elected official they've banned. Gab and Parler both work fine in a web browser.
> then that person has not in any meaningful way been censored by the government
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.
