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Epistemic status: wildly speculative
1
Is Twitter a regular company? Or is it, as Jack Dorsey and many others believe, more like a public utility?
I don’t think ‘public utility’ is the most useful metaphor to understand what Twitter and its peers actually are.
Public utilities make sense when the product is a simple commodity, essential for everyday life, and delivered through a set of pipes that are incredibly expensive to install and maintain. Because it doesn’t make sense for there to be lots of duplicate pipes and most people want basically the same thing from their water, electricity, and gas, the companies that run these are granted official government monopoly status in exchange for not charging too much and ensuring reliable access.
Social networks aren’t like this. There are no expensive pipes to install—in fact they are incredibly cheap to build. The problem is getting people to use them. Also, unlike public utilities, social networks offer complex value propositions. Different people want different things, so there can be no one-size-fits-all solution. Social networks are also generally free to use and generally always on, so the main problems public utilities are regulated to solve aren’t really an issue.
But just because Twitter isn’t much like a public utility doesn’t mean it’s a normal company, either.
2
I think the internet is more like land. In this metaphor:
- URLs ~= Places
- Links ~= Roads
- Networks ~= City-states
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I like this exploration.
When I've reviewed the current state of Twitter, a lot of my criticism has been at Elon for stating that he will make Twitter "free speech in that it will match the law." But Twitter already conforms to existing free speech laws in the USA. Nothing Elon is proposing seems workable.
But it is interesting to think about making online platforms actual democracies, with judiciaries.
One thing we don't want is for someone like Elon to dictate those terms (to essentially be an autocratic leader who sets up democratic-like systems).
For a proper exploration of why Twitter is not a public square, the First Amendment was written to restrict governments, not private companies, we need to "imagine [better] spaces designed for democracy," I highly recommend Dr. Mary Anne Franks' paper in the Yale Law Journal: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/beyond-the-public-square-imagining-digital-democracy