Republicans - advocators of free market & small government. Do you feel that Facebook, Twitter & other social media platforms should be allowed to set

Not a Republican, but conservative. I have zero issues with companies making their own decisions about how their business is run, and what rules will govern it's business.

The issue however, is when several of these companies, like Google, Facebook and Twitter get together and conspire to destroy another company that they don't like, with the governments blessing or even urging.

That's what happened to Parler.

Additionally, Google and Twitter conspired to block the Hunter Biden laptop story last fall which was also corrupt.

I have issues with that. I don't care if a company sets its own rules within its ecosystem.

I feel that they have become monopolies grown so monstrous in size they need to be downsized, like Ma Bell, which was cut into two parts, AT&T and Verizon. Too much power concentrated into an obviously politically motivated website is never a good thing.

Originally they were given some very special exemptions from the law, so that their users could not sue them for cancelling their accounts. I think it was called Section 230.

Now, their original terms of service have become ill defined, and slippery at best. Users content can be edited, therefore these social media websites have become editors. If they are editors, they no longer qualify under Section 230 to be exempt from lawsuits.

In some instances, users accounts have been deleted and restored in a fashion that would affect the dissemination of crucial information to voters during elections, such as the elimination of the New York Post account during the Biden election, because they aired a true report of Biden's son's shenanigans and published a report that Biden himself, using the name, The Big Guy, was skimming 10% from what Hunter made.

Newspaper accounts actually made money from their exposure on twitter and face book, due to increased exposure, and lost money when the Woke websites shut them down.

These were not just algorithms at work. This was active human intervention, as we saw in the case of Senator Tim Scott, whose rebuttal speech to Biden's State of the Union address received a barrage of racist responses on Twitter, where the racial slur "Uncle Tim" and "Oreo" were left up for ELEVEN hours.

Conservatives whose political views were upsetting to the Marxist left, on the other hand, were taken down within minutes.

WEEKS would go by while those same conservatives and newspapers would demand to know specifically WHY they were shut down for violations of.....WHAT TOS???? In other words, asking what they had said that was so wrong? In the end, reluctantly, Facebook and Twitter would restore their accounts, with a resounding...."Ooops!"

Free speech should be free speech. If you don't like a particular opinion, view...etc. simply block the person/group or unsubscribe from the platform altogether.

Picking and choosing which content is "allowed" leads to state run media and one sided propaganda. News and free thought opinions shouldn't be "bought" by advertisers or influenced by politics.

If the government gets that power...they won't be private companies anymore...no

The whole idea that government has a job here is lost in a corporatocracy.

Let thEm do what they want. I'm not obligated to use their website.

Government and TOS? What's the difference really? They work for the Government

There are different rules by law for publishers of content and platforms. Platforms have greater protection in the interest of free speech. The problem is when a platform starts to act as a publisher. Rather than regulate the TOS and companies, change their classification when they violate the legal standards. Publishers can censor, platforms are not supposed to outside the illegal stuff.

I don't think that the government should be able to tell companies what to do beyond preventing monopolies and guaranteeing worker's right and all that kind of stuff. But in terms of dictating the nitty-gritty like that, I have zero desire for the government to step in like that. The only giant group more stupid about those kinds of decisions than the companies themselves is the government.