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Comment by joshuaheard | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's time to consider Facebook, Twitter, et al, as common carriers, which, under the new net neutrality law, would disallow them from censoring content.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier#Telecommunicati...

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While I often disagree with the censorship on Facebook I also think it's required to some extend. Imagine an uncensored Facebook: how quickly would it degenerate into 4Chan?

If Facebook allowed nudity it would become a massive porn site over night. I actually understand their nudity censorship, just censor anything with naked people, to avoid complaints about differential treatment.

Facebook would go out of business if anyone could post anything. It wouldn't be a place most average people could enjoy or feel safe in.

>just censor anything with naked people It's a simple solution for a complex problem. Countries that follow this way end up covering up ancient statues - just in case, you know.

Whoa buddy, that's some pretty heavy socialism. Anyone can make a forum. Mandating moderation rules creates a restrictive barrier for entry and actually harms free speech that falls out of acceptable range

Whoa buddy, that's some pretty limited free market regulation thinking.

There's plenty of laws that only apply on certain companies, after n employees or x revenue. Should be pretty feasible to devise a law that applies to sites with more than n active users such as Facebook and twitter and the likes and not to your neighborhood forum.

Why is is the government's job at all to regulate this? Are you a fan of big government putting its hands all over everything?

As a European with pretty mainstream European political ideas, yes.

In related news, guess why my internet is fast and affordable.

My internet connection is fast and affordable.

Regulations like this are in stark opposition to free speech values. They are a band-aid that does more harm than good. The correct solution is to change mass perception that using these services for news consumption is a bad idea.

They could potentially have this... if they didn't filter or limit content at all (Safe Harbor) but Facebook (and Twitter) have explicitly chosen to do otherwise. They want to control what content is posted to them, very much so.

Facebook (and Twitter) want to have a particular narrative, and one that's ultimately to make their advertisers happier. If you don't agree with that (and, imho, you should take issue with that) then choose an actually free platform. One controlled by an American for-profit company will never be a truly free platform.

I just read a comment on HN that calls for using government to force private companies to host and serve content against their will.

Is this real life?

The telephone company has virtually no say over what is transferred over their phone lines. What if the phone company decided to use voice recognition to censor swear words during your phone conversation so all you heard was a bleep? Or suppose the electric company decided it didn't like what you were doing with electricity and only allowed electricity to the activities it approved. The law on common carriers goes back over 100 years.

Phone and electric are commodities with very, very high barriers to alternatives, and so they are regulated as common carriers.

There literally thousands of existing social sharing and networking sites in existence right now that serve as alternatives to facebook.

One of the arguments is that they are "controlling the dialogue," yet here were, having dialogue but not on Facebook.

At any rate, I doubt that you seriously believe your own arguments. For example, I doubt that you support Facebook being for to host white supremacy groups.

I agree with the interpretation of Facebook as a sort of ISP. One doesn't have to support hate groups, to support freedom of speech.

Maybe it's time we go back to the decentralized internet we had 15/20 years ago.

Maybe it's time to treat Facebook as the cancerous turd on society that it is.

I think you might have cause and effect reversed. Turd of a society created facebook.

I think you're both being somewhat overheated in your rhetoric, in a way that's likely to be less helpful than otherwise. Perhaps a bit more restraint might be of value? But of course that's your decision to make.

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