[remoteLily]

Should privately owned sites be allowed to control what content they display or should they be forced to accept whatever their users post? And we're talking about endpoints, not the carriers represented by ISPs and phone companies.

It's funny to me when conservatives talk about the sanctity of private property, and then want to force the owners and publishers of certain sites to have zero control over their own property. You can't have it both ways.

Also funny to me that conservatives censor like mad in their own properties. Parler, /r/conservative, RedState, and too many others to count, would delete posts from people like me on sight. Do you consider that censorship too, or is that acceptable?

[WClayFerguson]

It's the scale that matters. Once a company starts serving many millions of people, and becomes a nationwide backbone for some type of communications like Twitter, Facebook, Amazon services, email providers, telephone companies, etc. then it needs to be illegal for them to engage in discrimination and censorship based on political ideology.

Nobody's saying you can't run a small Federated server on Mastodon, for example, and "play god" with your users, but if you do that on a national level you need to be made to stop.

[root_axis]

Lumping in the phone companies with social media companies is fallacious. The phone companies and ISPs control a finite resource in the physical environment to the exclusion of other companies. Websites are not like this, they are decentralized nodes on a virtual network, the popularity of one node does not impact the capabilities or accessibility of other nodes. Arbitrary standards of popularity aren't a good metric for applying regulations, individual users make their own choices to visit various sites based on their own capricious preferences, nothing is forcing an individual to use a particular site except for their own perceptions on what they site might have to offer them.