The counterargument to that, of course, is that a handful of tech companies can't actually make your speech illegal, make their competition illegal, arrest you, imprison you, ban your speech across an entire country, burn your literature or have you and your ethic/religious/political group shot and dumped into shallow graves.

I mean, sure... getting banned from Twitter is momentarily annoying but Twitter having far more power to regulate speech than the entity that writes the laws that define Twitter's existence, that claims a monopoly on violence, and that in many cases directly controls the media and censors the internet? No.

It's a common argument but I've never really found it a compelling one.

> It's a common argument but I've never really found it a compelling one.

You can literally make your own twitter any time you want. My charitable view is that people are actually complaining about a monopoly on attention. It's an interesting subject but doesn't have anything to do with speech.

> You can literally make your own twitter any time you want.

Until cloud companies decide to stop hosting you and registrars refuse to register your domain.

But of course you can also make your own cloud company and your own domain registrar as well.

> But of course you can also make your own cloud company and your own domain registrar as well.

Until your upstream network provider decides to drop you (this happened to Epik, temporarily killing the whole company until they dropped 8chan).

But of course you could also make your own backbone ISP.

Epik was hosting platforms that contained extremist content, encouraged and celebrated mass violence and allowed conspirators to plan sedition against the government. Yes, if you're doing that, you should expect that some businesses may choose to reconsider their relationship with you.

It's not a problem even most garden variety racist assholes on the internet are likely to have, though.

Also, 8chan is doing fine.

While we're at it, let's just make an entirely new IP infrastructure.

Not universally true, Putin and Xi Jinping have more power than tech companies in their countries.

America decided 231 years ago that private actors would have more power over speech than the government.

Hopefully Russia banning FB will be just the start. I say that even though my highest upvoted submission since I've been on this website is a denunciation of my than Government apparently wanting to censor FB posts related to protests against it. That was back in 2017, I've since changed opinion when it comes to social networks and their vicious effects on our polities (be it a democracy or an autocracy).