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Comment by khedoros | Hacker News Reader

> In what sense? Legally they are, they act like one so I am not sure in practice what makes that distinct.

Facebook, Inc. is a publicly traded company. An example of a private company would be Dell Technologies.

Step 1) become facebooks majority shareholder. Step 2) do whatever you want with their censorship policy. Publicly traded companies are still private in the sense of ownership, their publicly traded because anyone can buy that private ownership, but until you do (and a lot of it) Facebook doesn't have any obligation to put what you want or don't want on their site. I still agree that their censorship policy is ridiculous, but they get to decide what kind of forum they are. I suggest you find a better forum cause imho fb just sucks in general

> I suggest you find a better forum cause imho fb just sucks in general

"Better", for what I use Facebook for, is equivalent to "has more people that I know". I don't expect much from it, and I get what I expect.

Sorry I interpreted the idea of "private" in this sense in comparison to governmental - not publicly traded - given the context of "censorship" and other comparisons to government type services.

You could be right. Reading the original comment again, they might have meant that Facebook has a level of influence that is exceptional for a private-sphere entity, rather than that they aren't privately-held.

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