Particles we're not familiar with emanating from a very remote, secluded location. Stray emissions picked up from a classified base, perhaps?

And the government issues charters private corporations - license or permission to exist - and is responsible for moderating their behavior to ensure they serve the public good. If a private corporation violates rights, the government is precluded from permitting that; it cannot authorize what it itself is not allowed to do. And per the Declaration, the government was established to uphold rights.

When the government fails to uphold rights - or worse, violates rights itself - it fails to justify its own existence.

Correct. I was aware of this, but many aren't and it's always good to restate it. The Constitution establishes, delegates limited authorities to, and limits government. The role of the People themselves was stated in the Declaration, and its that which recognizes in our system of law the source of the rights of the People.

An interesting nuance. 'We, the People' meant 'We, the People of these united States', and it was only they who were authorizing and establishing a government. But if the rights are deemed, in our system of law, God-given and unalienable, then those rights would exist for non-citizens as well even if their own government doesn't recognize that. Our government hopefully would, as part of the logical extension of the 'God-given' and 'unalienable' attributes its owners [the People of the U.S.] had ascribed to them.

Right, but the site's 'blocking from reading' only applies - bizarrely - if you're logged into an account that's blocked. Log out and anyone's 'Public' tweets become visible again.

The same is true of making a new account, making what others have called 'censorship' via blocking comparatively trivial. Not what we usually mean when we think of 'government censorship', though it's always good to be careful.

We tend to forget that these 'open' platforms are privately-owned by corporations which control them. Our presence on them is conditional on their acceptance, and on the terms and conditions in their user contract. These aren't the same as public parks, for example.

It gets more interesting when we remember that corporations are given permission or license ['corporate charters'] by the government to exist if and only if they serve the public good; the government stated that corporate charters exist to be revoked when this is not so, although the actual practice has been increasingly ignored of late. So when you have social media companies violating free speech rights, influencing elections by favoring this or that political position and muffling the rest and so on, you have rights violations and clearly a breach of the public confidence, let alone the public good. Since corporations exist at the discretion and under the authority of the government, it follows that the government is unable to allow corporations to violate rights just as the government itself is not allowed to do that.

Whether that means the government has a responsibility and liability to yank corporate charters in all those situations for that reason becomes a very compelling question.

For the purposes of First Amendment protection, yes, public digital forums are generally going to be considered "public". However, as I pointed out, the First Amendment only protects you from the government. The government is generally going to be prohibited from preventing you from accessing online digital forums. So I think it raises the question, is the government preventing homeless people from accessing these digital forums?

Looking at it simply and directly, the answer is "no". Economic factors are creating roadblocks to them gaining access.

However, I think you could make a more complex argument that the government has some obligation (moral if not legal) to enable people to access the Internet, on First Amendment grounds. The Internet is becoming the dominant form of telecommunications infrastructure. If you don't have Internet access, then you can't engage in the public political debate, at least not on equal footing with anyone who has the Internet. You can't post your own thoughts, but you also don't have access to what other people are saying. And though the government isn't actively prohibiting access to the Internet, the Internet did grow out of a government program, which makes them partially responsible for its effects, and the government is also partially responsible for the economic factors that prevent people from having access.

Surely that doesn't gain as much traction as the First Amendment argument itself. If a right is God-given and unalienable, and the purpose of governments is to uphold rights...

Taxation for such purposes then becomes interesting. Then again, prior generations saw no problem subsidizing libraries with public funds.

Bingo.

Judicial, executive and legislative corruption resulting in comparatively lawless corporate marauding, which then caused massive financial disparity, now puts us in a scenario in which impoverished citizens cannot reasonably speak, listen or be heard. Of course without the courts restored, holding them accountable for that is probably a lost cause.

Not 'illegal' [what crime?], but rather the argument being that the People haven't delegated that authority to the office of the Presidency via the Constitution.

An odd interpretation of censorship. As though that viewpoint would have no means to express itself if not to that @ account? That's a little different than the alphabet gestapo scrubbing all traces of someone's free speech on an issue.

I honestly believe that the inability to access a space on the basis of financial inequality necessarily privatizes it.

There are illiterate people who could become literate; that's not an external constraint. And even the poorest people in the U.S. have the ability to cross the country, though it's not as convenient as flying and takes much longer. Those aren't external barriers, and not to acknowledge even inadvertent gatekeeping in forums, particularly a political context, is disconcerting.

Good netiquette and polite, civil discourse make the experience more worthwhile for all involved. I encourage you to try them. They make others want to read you, give their consideration to your views and continue to interact with you, and they cost you nothing.

Seems to assume all Twitter users are U.S. citizens. That not allowing someone to talk to you is a violation of their right to free speech. And that digital forums are 'public', despite plenty of homeless and impoverished citizens lacking access to them.

The case for theft is weak at best. It presumes hypothetical revenue losses that companies would have garnered if people had bought the product or subscribed to the service. In most cases I've encountered, people have either been so bad off economically or insufficiently interested in the media that the choice was between viewing it for free or not viewing it. The presumption of theft is antithetical in a society where guilt must be proven rather than just presumed. That's why they use terms like 'the alleged theft' on the news where it hasn't been established, rather than assume legal liability for defamation of character. But corporate media are well aware that if they repeat something long enough, it will get stuck in the minds of their audience.

The presumed theft argument also presupposes fair courts and unbiased copyright laws, of which we have neither. U.S. courts are not courts of law, and copyright has been extended to roughly a century - an unreasonable and rather biased state of affairs in a society where information technology means the duration of media relevance decreases substantially rather than increases.