Twitter would tell you the same thing, and Jim removes content and zots users - just like Twitter.
Free Republic is not a publicly traded company. Twitter is.
Twitter referred its fact checkers as mainstream media. We are talking broadcasters who have power to creat theater fire hysteria with their collective reach.
Google, youtube, twitter and FB are joined to stifle conservative speech. They have billions of views and subscribers. They systematically block opponents of democrats who are running against them in the election and rational gentlemen like Dennis Prager. They have the ability to effect the outcome of national elections by stifling political speech.
When FR reaches a billion subscribers and can significantly effect the election by stifling liberal speech, then it may be regulated.
When your e-mail and phone call contest are blocked you might take a second look.
FR is privately held.
“Twitter would tell you the same thing, and Jim removes content and zots users - just like Twitter.”
But Jim’s FR is not engaged in the overthrow of our constitutional republic, nor is Jim carrying out orders from the ChiComms.
Lunatic libertarians don’t understand that you can’t start a business and engage in treason.
Between the two of them, Twitter and Facebook have, for all intents and purposes monopolized social media - a term that didn’t even exist 20 years ago. That’s the key difference between Twitter and Facebook and other sites like Freerepublic. It’s not enough to say “Nobody’s stopping others from competing with them”. By their nature, these companies have essentially evolved into public utilities. If there were 20 Facebook-like companies people could choose to belong to, the collective value of those companies would be much less than one Facebook. That’s because people look to Social Media platforms to connect them to as many people as possible. That’s their main feature, and it’s what most attracts people to them. Without that, they lose their value, and that’s the main reason Myspace died an early death.
Nobody forced people to ditch Myspace for Facebook. It happened organically, as people didn’t want two Facebook-like companies, and they collectively voted for Facebook to be the one place where they could connect to virtually anyone they wanted to.
Social media is an example of a natural monopoly. It doesn’t need to be enforced in order to develop. People seek it out and it results from the inevitable collective choice of the consumer to have just one source for the product.
Common sense, as well as our anti-trust laws, recognize the potential dangers that can develop from monopolistic control of an industry. We are seeing those dangers being played out in social media. They can either be addressed through regulation, or through direct government ownership, but they need to be addressed as they profoundly effect something most important in a free society - the free exchange of ideas.