[Reelin]

> Nobody is claiming this.

The person I responded to did, in fact, directly imply this. Recall that I had compared the impact of modern mainstream social media to that of the printing press historically. Directly ignoring my central point clearly places your comment in bad faith.

"Freedom of reach" is nothing more than a thinly veiled attack on (cultural, not legal) freedom of speech (and liberalism more generally) for the reasons I've already articulated in this and nearby threads.

[dTal]

Original person you responded to here - I did not, in fact, imply this. My thesis is that your analogy is broken. We agree that having a domain and a VPS is a poor substitute for a voice on a major social network; likewise, owning your own printing press is no substitute for, say, a regular column in a popular newspaper. It's incorrect to frame it as forbidding access to technology, when what it really is is a middleman refusing to do business with you. We can debate about the precise nature of the middleman, but the presence or absence thereof is the defining feature. You CAN publish without Facebook. You CAN'T publish (paper) without a printing press.

It also bears noting that the gap in access to publishing technology has radically narrowed - it is WAY easier and cheaper to buy a domain and a VPS and publish your thoughts to the entire world without any content middleman, than it was to procure your own physical press and set up an operation to print even thousands of leaflets, let alone publish something with global reach. You have access to - pretty much - all the same technology that Facebook does.