Is Twitter FORCED to censor?

… they are private companies, so they can do what they want. But why would they want to? 

… the purpose of private for-profit corporations is, needless to say, to make a profit

… Shareholders expect management to create value, not destroy it

… what Twitter is doing by censoring is precisely subverting its own business model

… thus undermining profitability and putting downward pressure on share price

… Censored speech … translates into lost traffic for the platform

… We could call this the “Twitter conundrum.”

… is no way that Twitter could possibly “want” to censor Covid dissident voices, or indeed any voices, and thus restrict its own traffic

… There is a financial gun pointed at Twitter

… But it is not the Biden administration, but rather the European Commission … that has its finger on the trigger

… is the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which was passed by the European Parliament last July 5 amidst almost total indifference – in Europe as much as in the United States 

… momentous and disastrous implications for freedom of speech worldwide

… gives the European Commission the power to impose fines of up to 6% of global turnover on “very large online platforms

… that it finds to be non-compliant with its censorship requirements

… the Commission’s censorship expectations do not only affect the accounts of users based in the EU, but of users all around the world

… the Commission “guidance” refers to the kind of censorship data presented above as “key performance indicators”

… will participate in a “permanent task-force” chaired by the European Commission 

… American commentators have been up in arms about occasional, informal contacts between social media companies and the Biden administration

… whereas those same companies have been systematically reporting back to the European Commission on their censorship efforts for the last two years now and they will henceforth be part of a permanent task force on “combatting disinformation” – aka censoring — chaired by the European Commission

… subordinates online platforms to the Commission’s censorship agenda and requires them to implement it on pain of ruinous fines

… DSA gives the Commission “exclusive” – in effect, dictatorial – powers to determine compliance and to apply sanction

… For the online platforms, the Commission is judge, jury and executioner

… the Commission will also be able to “inspect a platform’s premises and get access to its databases and algorithms.”

… Twitter censorship is government censorship. But the government in question is not the US government, but rather the European Union, and the EU is, in effect, imposing its censorship on the entire world