If they were the only way to communicate, no, but they’re not, and even if they were, the solution is still to pass a law, not reinterpret the First Amendment to say something it doesn’t by looking at it funny and reading it aloud in your best Al Capone as a chipmunk voice in order to draw out a spirit that isn’t actually there.
I’m okay with Twitter and Facebook doing whatever they want to their crappy websites. They aren’t the web, they’re not even all the social media apps on the web. They’re just a couple of large fish in the Ocean.
The mistake you’re making is assuming the discourse on Twitter matters. Arguably the President’s tweets do matter as much as anything the President does, but outside that scope it isn’t as representative of society as the site’s core users believe it to be. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t punch above its weight in driving discourse, but it is just one more tool in a world that is not lacking in ways to send what is effectively a text message.
I mean arguably this forum post I’m writing is hardly distinguishable from a text message. I’m typing this on my phone, and there’s a decent chance you or someone else is reading this on their phone.
On any given day someone might be participating on Twitter, Facebook, an IRC channel, their email, Discord, Slack, Reddit, whatever. They might even write a blog or publish a podcast. At the end of the day it is all communications, as much as saying a toast at a wedding or a cheers at the bar. It’s not important to me that Twitter shoots itself in the foot so long as they’re not the only way for people to gather and communicate, and they are objectively not the only way for people to gather and communicate because that’s an enormous chunk of what people spend their lives doing.
EDIT: this occurred to me after my original post, that I didn’t really address your gather to protest point.
First, the kind of protesting that you’re talking about taking place on Twitter falls into two categories: coordinating a protest in meatspace, or collectively whining.
Second, actual protests still happen all the bloody time in meatspace. The March for Life, the Women’s March, there was a controversial protest in Virginia a few years back with a controversial counter protest which ended with someone driving an automobile into the crowd. There was a drive-thru protest in Michigan a few weeks ago, and people gathered to protest Newsom closing the beaches in Orange County not long after that. Protests, in the free to assemble sense, are still a largely meatspace event with some coordination taking place using whatever modern comms tech is convenient. Back when modern comms tech wasn’t convenient and available and safe to use, Hong Kong protesters turned to mesh networking applications last year.
I’m okay with Twitter and Facebook doing whatever they want to their crappy websites. They aren’t the web, they’re not even all the social media apps on the web. They’re just a couple of large fish in the Ocean.
The mistake you’re making is assuming the discourse on Twitter matters. Arguably the President’s tweets do matter as much as anything the President does, but outside that scope it isn’t as representative of society as the site’s core users believe it to be. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t punch above its weight in driving discourse, but it is just one more tool in a world that is not lacking in ways to send what is effectively a text message.
I mean arguably this forum post I’m writing is hardly distinguishable from a text message. I’m typing this on my phone, and there’s a decent chance you or someone else is reading this on their phone.
On any given day someone might be participating on Twitter, Facebook, an IRC channel, their email, Discord, Slack, Reddit, whatever. They might even write a blog or publish a podcast. At the end of the day it is all communications, as much as saying a toast at a wedding or a cheers at the bar. It’s not important to me that Twitter shoots itself in the foot so long as they’re not the only way for people to gather and communicate, and they are objectively not the only way for people to gather and communicate because that’s an enormous chunk of what people spend their lives doing.
EDIT: this occurred to me after my original post, that I didn’t really address your gather to protest point.
First, the kind of protesting that you’re talking about taking place on Twitter falls into two categories: coordinating a protest in meatspace, or collectively whining.
Second, actual protests still happen all the bloody time in meatspace. The March for Life, the Women’s March, there was a controversial protest in Virginia a few years back with a controversial counter protest which ended with someone driving an automobile into the crowd. There was a drive-thru protest in Michigan a few weeks ago, and people gathered to protest Newsom closing the beaches in Orange County not long after that. Protests, in the free to assemble sense, are still a largely meatspace event with some coordination taking place using whatever modern comms tech is convenient. Back when modern comms tech wasn’t convenient and available and safe to use, Hong Kong protesters turned to mesh networking applications last year.