Justice Thomas grumbles over Trump's social media ban

Thomas goes on to describe the sheer scope of Facebook and Google&#x27;s market power, citing Facebook&#x27;s roughly 3 billion users and Google&#x27;s 90% market share in search. &quot;It changes nothing that these platforms are not the sole means for distributing speech or information. A person always could choose to avoid the toll bridge or train and instead swim the Charles River or hike the Oregon Trail,&quot; Thomas writes. &quot;But in assessing whether a company exercises substantial market power, what matters is whether the alternatives are comparable. For many of today&#x27;s digital platforms, nothing is.&quot;<p>Thomas states that in order for an account like @realdonaldtrump to be truly classified as government controlled, &quot;the power of a platform to unilaterally remove a government account&quot; would have to be &quot;reduced.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26700921" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26700921</a>

&gt; The justice didn’t elaborate much on that argument, but he hinted that the platforms’ First Amendment rights could be limited much as business owners can be forced to accept customers regardless of race or religion.<p>I don&#x27;t like this framing. Does net neutrality limit the first amendment rights of ISPs? Did Marsh v. Alabama limit the first amendment rights of company towns?

The sooner one of the Justices who played a role in bringing the reign of Citizens United to the US fades into obscurity, the better.

Who&#x27;d have guessed that Thomas and Bernie Sanders would agree on anything?

I mean the platforms all laid out rules about what you were allowed to do, bent over backwards to allow politicians to ignore them, and then finally actually enforced them after innumerable warnings.<p>No one was forced to make baseless attacks on the election. No one was forced to support an attempted coup.