These are private companies. If they want to limit speech, that is absolutely their right. And as conservatives, we should support that right. That being said, we are also free to develop competitors.
I am not so sure. There are far more barriers to conservatives developing competitors than to leftsts doing so. I hope you are correct.
Waiting for the "We'll just make our own internet, wires and everything, from scratch!" idiocy to show up.
“These are private companies. If they want to limit speech, that is absolutely their right ...”
I agree totally. Furthermore I’d say half of the problem is the gullible audience.
Try that argument 50 years ago.
Why didn't somebody develop a competing telephone system to the Bell Telephone Company? The reason is that, once an infrastructure is in place and established in every home, it's nearly impossible to entice people onto a new system.
The solution was the break-up of Bell into the "baby Bells." This followed the pattern of the break-up of Standard Oil into the "seven sisters" because Standard had control of the gasoline infrastructure.
More recently, we've seen the break-up of single-provider home electricity distribution. Companies compete to deliver electricity on common-carrier transmission lines. The same was true for cable TV and internet services that were once controlled by the companies that initially laid the wires into the homes. Now, they must let others compete for services on their transmission lines.
Remember when Netscape sued Microsoft for bundling their Internet Explorer into the operating system? The courts ruled that Microsoft's practice was anti-competitive and ordered that the browser be decoupled to allow for competition. (As a side note, many here argued that this only happened because Bill Clinton was President and Bill Gates hadn't been as generous then with donations as he's become since the lawsuit).
So why should Facebook be any different? In fact, Facebook, YouTube, et. al., rely on ISP service providers to connect their product to customers. What would happen if Comcast, Cox, AT&T, and others decided to deplatform Facebook from their infrastructure and block their TCP/IP addresses from reaching their customers? Of course, this won't happen because the ISPs are of like mind to Facebook.
If Facebook is like the Bell Company of old, Free Republic would be like short-wave radio to them. Facebook is too established for a competitor to take it on now. The only solution is to break it up and regulate them, like Standard Oil and Bell Telephone before them.
-PJ
Speak for yourself.
These are crony capitalist monopolies serving the interests of Big Government. They promote the censorship of all points of view that don't serve the need of their Big Government, crony capitalistic and monopolistic partnership.