this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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I'm not saying it is identical, there are some key differences, and yet social media platforms are much more like a publishing company than they are a town square. Just because they're choosing to publish your tweets/posts for free and you're choosing to create content without pay doesn't mean it's not a better analogy than saying their the equivalent of a public space. They're very clearly not a public space. Using the street analogy, these are storefronts on the street, not the street itself. Again, the Internet itself is the street. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Mastodon, Lemmy, or whatever social media platform, are not the street or the town square. They are not and should not be considered to be public spaces any more than a mall or a Walmart is.
Internet is a bunch of compters connected together. Social media sites are a part of the internet. If you say internet itself is a street, then social media sites are part of that street as well. If you're just thinking about just the supporting infrastructure like cables, routers and switches, a lot of them belong to private companies as well. So you're talking about a street in a gated community, then you shouldn't expect any attributes of public space there either. Do you see that diiferentiating social media sites from public spaces just because they are owned by companies fail very quickly when you apply the reasoning consistently? Internet is quickly approaching the status of a basic human right, yet most of it is owned by private companies.
Do you know what's equivalent to malls and Walmart on internet? That's Amazon, eBay and Alibaba.
What's the analogy to a real world place people go to express themselves, protest and engage with the broader society? The closest I can think of is a town square.
So a better analogy in my opinion is,