I am so tired of this disingenuous line of argumentation. Twitter is not at all like a government, it is a private business that offers a free service which you are under no obligation to use, it has no army or legal authority over your life, stop acting like what gets posted or removed from twitter is anything other than a bullshit triviality.
When a company has a total monopoly over a sector, you are obliged to use the service they provide or you will simply go without that service entirely.
Twitter is not a clear example of this, because it doesn't really have a solid monopoly. But Google and Facebook certainly are - there really isn't a competitor to YouTube or Google Search, and there isn't a competing social network to Facebook.
How does this reconcile with the laws of many euro countries compelling website forums to delete content that they deem objectionable? Most recently France passed such a law[0].
> There are multiple levels of fines. It starts at hundreds of thousand of euros but it can reach up to 4% of the global annual revenue of the company with severe cases.
How can these euro countries claim to be free societies when they restrict the most basic element of personal freedom?
It's not just France. Several of the euro countries have laws like this.
Why does it need to reconcile? EU governments are allowed to make stupid or bad policies. That doesn't contradict the basic fact that Twitter is not at all like a government, even when it is forced by actual governments to remove content.
Whether or not you care about Twitter content removal is subjective, but the answer of whether you should care more if Twitter or the government removed the content is pretty clear: you should care more about the government every time. Latching onto "should we care" is kind of pedantic and misses the point.
The most Twitter can do is tell you to find somewhere else to publish your speech. The most the French / German / Chinese government can do is destroy your entire life and the lives of everyone who publishes or consumes your speech.
So when a government leader starts talking about suppressing critical speech, that's a lot more worrisome than Twitter deleting tweets. The abuse of power is hardly comparable. You might even say that in comparison, it's a bullshit triviality.
