Why is this topic dominating HN?? It's just a private website enforcing its own made up rules. They can do whatever they like, ban whoever they don't like. If you have a problem with it make your own Twitter.
Hundreds of millions of people use it. That something happens to be under some control of private interests, doesn't make it necessarily a private thing.
To the extent that something is in the commons, well it's public. At least newsworthy and much more.
The Federal Reserve is privately owned but we don't treat it like some rando llc.
Your are confusing 'legal ownership of assets' with control, influence and power.
It's difficult because the former perspective is more formal than the later, but really, it's not at all.
In 1900 if your home was burning down, the firemen would only come if you paid a specific firehouse for insurance. If they were fighting a different fire, or if you didn't pay - then your place burns down. Even if all the firefighters are doing nothing. And your house will probably cause a bunch of other fires, creating viral destruction.
Obviously this is completely stupid. So we socialized it, and even with 'government inefficiencies' it still has better outcomes than the former scenario.
TikTok is a 'private company' until we decide it's not.
There are externalizes in everything.
If you want multi-generational asset permanence, you can stick to property ownership.
Very sure that I've seen the same statement made before the Twitter takeover that it being a private platform and they can do whatever they like, add and enforce whatever rules in their TOS they like and ban whoever they like as long as long it is legal. It is still true now and it always has been for Twitter.
If anyone doesn't like the bans on impersonators, unlabelled bots, real time live location trackers and the now removed illegal CP and child exploitation images being posted on Twitter which stayed their for years on Twitter before the takeover, they can indeed build their own federated Twitter to post all of that garbage.
Twitter has always been a cesspool and the people screaming here about it should have left Twitter years ago; before Musk, instead of tolerating the garbage that proliferated on the site.
