(Unfortunately HN put me in the "You're replying too fast, please slow down" state last night so I was unable to reply, and so I'm not sure if anyone will see this reply now. I wonder if that should be called censorship?)
There is absolutely a "market for censorship," because there's a market for everything a company does! That's the whole idea of the free market - every decision a publicly-traded company makes is a participation in the market, and they take the whole state of the world into account as best as they can. When a corporation says "Happy Pride" or "Merry Christmas" or whatever, sure, part of that is the genuine belief of some of their employees, but there is absolutely a decision that doing so is better for the business than not. (Some of this decision is based on whether it's better for the business to make those employees happy. Most of it is based on whether they'll make potential customers angry by doing so or not doing so.)
If social media companies are getting heat in the public discourse for not doing X, then yes, it's a market-based calculation to say to themselves, "If we keep not doing X, our public image will suffer, which is bad for the business, so let's do it." And since the public discourse changes, the market conditions that lead to certain decisions change with it, too. If on December 1 the media gets mad about people not saying "Merry Christmas," on December 2 the market value of deciding to say it has gone up, and nobody would be surprised to see multiple companies react or expect them to have talked to each other before reacting. If last week the media gets mad about Holocaust-denial content, this week the market value of banning it has gone up.
... And there's a more visible form of this which I left out because I thought it was implied by "responded to market conditions": both companies wanted to make an unpopular decision because they think it will be long-term good for their business, but whoever moves first will suffer a short-term loss. As soon as one company does it, though, that gives cover for any other company. You see this in pretty self-explanatory free markets like competing gas stations across the street: if station A raises their prices, station B is free to raise their prices to match without losing any business relative to status quo ante. So they both end up waiting until they're pretty confident the other wants to raise prices too (which - again - they can judge from the state of the world and not from talking to each other), and then someone updates their signboard, and then the other gas station follows.
It's not collusion when two gas stations raise their prices to the same price. It's how the market works. You can dismiss the fact that the free market is fundamentally an engine of communication as "not interesting" if you like, but that doesn't change how the free market works. It's not coincidental at all - they participate in the same market. But it's also how the market is supposed to work.
> As soon as one company does it, though, that gives cover for any other company.
That was exactly my point! "The quick collective action tends to dilute the criticism against any single one of those companies."
The problem in this case is that Facebook and Twitter are not simply local gas stations. They are two of the biggest social networks in the world, with billions of users. They effectively control a gigantic chunk of the entire market, in a way that is nowhere even remotely analogous to local gas stations. Even if 2 gas stations explicitly colluded, they couldn't hope to control the market, because there are just too many gas stations. You can't drive a mile down the road and find another Facebook. There's only 1 Facebook in the world.
You haven't actually showed that there's a market for censorship, because it's not obvious that censorship is actually financially beneficial to those companies. This is a controversial decision at best, and not really analogous to the price of gas, where the financial implications are clear. I'm not saying it's false (after all, I'm the one who suggested the idea), but it requires more elaboration than "there's a market for everything".
EDIT: Reportedly the US Senate will subpoena Jack Dorsey, so there's already severe backlash.
> The problem in this case is that Facebook and Twitter are not simply local gas stations. They are two of the biggest social networks in the world, with billions of users. They effectively control a gigantic chunk of the entire market, in a way that is nowhere even remotely analogous to local gas stations.
I agree that this is a problem, and I think we need to break up Facebook and Twitter and Google and Amazon and all other large companies, because by their sheer size they distort the free market. But it's worth being precise about what the problem is, lest we make it worse. The problem is not that these particular companies did something unique, and if we let other companies grow in their place they'll do better. The problem is that any market that has companies of this size is distorted and does not function as we want it to function. Today it's this problem. Tomorrow it's something else. Are you going to subpoena Jack Dorsey every time the oligopoly makes an individual business decision that the ruling party doesn't like?
There's nothing functionally distinct between what Facebook and Twitter did and what two gas stations do all the time - the problem is scope. If we start looking for evidence of "collusion," and it turns out (which I hope you admit is at least possible) that there was none because they did the same thing at the same time because of standard market mechanisms, what do we do at that point?
One of the common proposals - making Twitter and Facebook obligated to carry certain content - not only is a practical mess because it cements their oligopoly role and puts the government in charge of determining each new abuse, it also really ought to be a philosophical mess, abandoning any pretense of valuing the free market and valuing liberty.
(Another way of putting this might be, a "free" market without aggressive regulation to prevent anyone from "winning" too strongly will quickly cease to be free, and the "free" market as a tool works well in cases where the barrier to entry is low and the barrier to becoming a giant is high, like gas stations, and less well in cases where the barrier to entry is high and gaining control of the market makes it easier to lock others out ... like Standard Oil. It would be far more liberty-minded to say, once you grow to a certain size, that you must split the companies into smaller independent companies than to say that the government tells you how to run yourself.)
There is absolutely a "market for censorship," because there's a market for everything a company does! That's the whole idea of the free market - every decision a publicly-traded company makes is a participation in the market, and they take the whole state of the world into account as best as they can. When a corporation says "Happy Pride" or "Merry Christmas" or whatever, sure, part of that is the genuine belief of some of their employees, but there is absolutely a decision that doing so is better for the business than not. (Some of this decision is based on whether it's better for the business to make those employees happy. Most of it is based on whether they'll make potential customers angry by doing so or not doing so.)
If social media companies are getting heat in the public discourse for not doing X, then yes, it's a market-based calculation to say to themselves, "If we keep not doing X, our public image will suffer, which is bad for the business, so let's do it." And since the public discourse changes, the market conditions that lead to certain decisions change with it, too. If on December 1 the media gets mad about people not saying "Merry Christmas," on December 2 the market value of deciding to say it has gone up, and nobody would be surprised to see multiple companies react or expect them to have talked to each other before reacting. If last week the media gets mad about Holocaust-denial content, this week the market value of banning it has gone up.
... And there's a more visible form of this which I left out because I thought it was implied by "responded to market conditions": both companies wanted to make an unpopular decision because they think it will be long-term good for their business, but whoever moves first will suffer a short-term loss. As soon as one company does it, though, that gives cover for any other company. You see this in pretty self-explanatory free markets like competing gas stations across the street: if station A raises their prices, station B is free to raise their prices to match without losing any business relative to status quo ante. So they both end up waiting until they're pretty confident the other wants to raise prices too (which - again - they can judge from the state of the world and not from talking to each other), and then someone updates their signboard, and then the other gas station follows.
It's not collusion when two gas stations raise their prices to the same price. It's how the market works. You can dismiss the fact that the free market is fundamentally an engine of communication as "not interesting" if you like, but that doesn't change how the free market works. It's not coincidental at all - they participate in the same market. But it's also how the market is supposed to work.