I'm aware of that. But as you are no doubt aware, a very very large number of commentators who really ought to know better are explicitly saying that it's a matter of "free speech rights" (which is obviously is not) or that it's a First Amendment issue (which, again, it obviously is not).
I'm very tired of it. I was just honestly wondering if anyone else is tired of it, too.
It seems to me that if could just stop debating in bad faith, perhaps we could then get to the actual issue, which is that some people think that private companies should not be allowed to do content moderation and that we'd all be magically better off if this were not allowed, or at least, not a common practice. Then we could have a debate on that question, without all the stupid noise about whether this is a real free speech issue.
I'm tired of people minimizing the problem by nitpicking. Like the conflict, which is what this is, a conflict between incompatible interests, just vanishes once I open up the dictionary. Oh! That's what that word means! Alright, let's go home everyone. Just World Hypothesis still holds. Nice work.
The crux of the issue is the same, regardless: silencing dissent.
Semantic arguments deployed to try to constrain the working definition of censorship (i.e. "it's a private platform, it can do what it want, if you don't like it just build your own and overturn overwhelming network effects through magic lmao!") are typically obfuscation and almost never in good faith.
And I think that you'll learn that a great many see right through them and are, indeed, very fucking tired of humoring them. Including, apparently, Elon Musk.
This is an example of "nutpicking": "The practice of sifting through the comments of blogs, email threads, discussion groups and other user generated content in an attempt find choice quotes proving that the advocates for or against a particular political opinion are unreasonable, uninformed extremists."
