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Twitter banning an account at the behest of the government is absolutely censorship. Sure Twitter is free to ban me. But Twitter is free to allow me to speak without retribution from the government.

The government has no business threatening companies to silence people.



Trying to head off this response is why I added "(the same kind of / as bad) censorship". The government has no business threatening companies to silence people, but if they do threaten companies to silence people that's not the same as arresting you for criticising the government, it's not the same thing as limiting Free Speech(tm). Twitter is free to allow you to speak without retribution from the government, but compelling Twitter to let you speak, to provide you a service you aren't paying for, is another matter again.

Where the lines fall on that is up for debate, in arguments about whether large enough sites are like public services, or should be public services, whether websites are blind conduits for information or responsible for the content on them, and the fact that all that is being argued is evidence that it hasn't been settled in a dystopian way.

If I threw $10 to ICQ to delete your account that you haven't used in a decade, you could still argue "censorship! you have no business doing that!" and be correct, but any point about it being a limit on your free speech would be much much more obviously weak.




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