#Twitter cancelled me yrs ago when I refused to give a mobile ph#. Now I heard twitter has started pushing a #Cloudflare-dependent #CAPTCHA on their users who connect over Tor. #cancelTwitter

So even if you provide #Twitter your mobile ph# you’re still fucked. Not just b/c twitter exploited your ph# for advertising, and not just b/c users phone numbers were leaked to black hats, but also because you’re still forced to solve a CF hosted CAPTCHA, assuming CF even gives you priviledge of accessing the puzzle. So then you have to consider that politicians use Twitter.

It’s an attack on #democracy because it means that even fewer citizens have access to their representatives. #freeSpeech #1A

@koherecoWatchdog Nobody needs a Twitter account to "have access to their representatives". They all have press secretaries, and phone lines if you want to get in touch. And if you absolutely must get your comms from the bird site, you don't need to have an account to read.

@LouisIngenthron You’ve misunderstood the role of Twitter & how open microblogging works. The biggest part of getting a msg to a representative is to be publicly seen delivering that msg. A letter sent by fax or post is /easily/ ignored by a politician (in effect, no access). A msg that 10s of thousands of people see you give a politician is how you get access to your representative.

@LouisIngenthron If you are good at getting access to your representative, the rep is largely just a prop. It’s all about getting thousands of other users boosting and holding up your msg to the rep. THAT is what compels a rep to read what you write.

@koherecoWatchdog So... a petition?

Why do you think these concepts are unique to social media?

@LouisIngenthron A petition has a threshold requirement that open letters do not. If you don’t collect enough sigs (a labor-intensive effort), the msg never gets to the rep.

@LouisIngenthron Petitions are also off-limits to non-citizens. You are limited to those who qualify to sign the petition.

@koherecoWatchdog And fixing that would be a reasonable reform that many people could get behind.

@LouisIngenthron Yes it would but it still would not reach a point where a petition could be the drop-in replacement for an open letter.

@koherecoWatchdog ...which is why we have open letters.

@LouisIngenthron You claimed just a moment ago that petitions replace open letters, so we don’t need open letters. You claimed if you can’t get enough sigs, the idea has no merit worthy of the reps attention. Now you’re saying open letters have a place. Yet these are the same open letters that have weakened in the face of the internet.

@LouisIngenthron Hence microblogging as a tool to effectively get a msg to a rep with the degree of impact open letters had 50+ years ago.

@koherecoWatchdog Great! If you want to do that and access that microblog platform's audience, then all you have to do is agree to play by their rules. Free marketplace of ideas in action.