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Comment by mzw_mzw | Hacker News Reader

>It's amazing how people act like they have the "right" to post some content anywhere.

It's amazing how, every time a private organization is criticized for how it handles speech on its platform, some tedious rando jumps out of the woodwork to smugly lecture everyone about how private organizations don't have legal obligations to host anything.

Yes. We know. We know, we know, we know, we all know. The First Amendment does not apply. We are not saying that Google is legally required to do anything. We are saying that Google's behavior is not in the spirit of free speech and chills discourse. That's it. Can we take it as read that everyone's up to speed on this and move on without the pointless derail, please?

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It's amazing how widespread the idea that that, because it's legal for private organisations to take down whatever content they like, no-one should criticise them for it has become. However could this belief that benefits those with immense influence over the public discourse have become so common?

Your tone suggests some sort of nefarious plot, but in the US that idea is widely consistent with fairly prevalent preferences for strong private property rights and a distrust of regulation that predates mass media.

A business owner is seen as more like the average person than is a regulator or other academic "public discourse"-spouting person.

Today they're telling Youtube what to do, tomorrow they're telling your company what to do...

See also positions on NIMBYism vs "it's my land, why can't I build whatever I want?", Uber and AirBNB vs existing regulations, and many others.

I don't think there's any kind of actual conspiracy going on; it's just that this argument is a convenient political soldier. If these companies were censoring the other side politically, it's the other political side that would be deploying it.

On on the side of, society extends corporations a lot of rights and protection. Stand to reason that demands that they serve the public interest aren't unreasonable. Especially in this case where the claim is corporations are abusing a right; copyright and trademark protection.

Which in this case, just to keep things concrete, would be in the service of compelling people to host objectionable speech against their will.

"objectionable speech" is a pretty melodramatic way of saying "parody videos of a consumer product", on par with "taxation is violence and theft"

They object to the speech and decline to host it. Juggle the words however you like to make it more emotionally palatable to you. My goal is to speak precisely.

If your goal is to be precise, you should double check the definition of objectionable. It means that the common man would deem it offensive, not that a particular party would object to it for a reason like saving face.

You want your common carrier protection or not?

Going even further, another way to interpret the 1st Amendment is that it is the federal governments responsibility to protect those freedoms, and that it would be well within the power of Congress to enact laws prohibiting the censoring of free speech, even on so called private platforms. This sort of thing has been done in the past, for example by prohibiting discrimination based on race even in private establishments.

Actually, I don't think this is a valid interpretation of the First Amendment, which is written specifically to circumscribe the powers given to Congress, beginning "Congress shall make no law..."

In other words, this is a right to be protected, not just passively allowed.

Perhaps people at HN know. But I'd argue internet users in general don't. Just look at the outcry that happens when reddit censors stuff.

Outcry is one of the mechanisms that dissuades censorship on privately-owned mediums. Let's have more outcry please.

You are totally right, we should disown whoever posseses the digital main-street. Its outrageous the public, the people of the constitution have to be beggars in some private backyard.

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