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Comment by yarou | Hacker News Reader

Careful.

The implicit solution you're suggesting would curtail the First amendment. That's a bigger threat to democracy than a misinformed populace IMHO. What we really need are annotations that are community driven. A "bs meter" if you will.

Edit: Corrected populous -> populace

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The first amendment forbids the government from restricting speech, not Google

Sure, "Google" as a private entity can curtail freedom of speech on its platform. It becomes less clear when Facebook, Twitter, and Google are effectively public goods.

Except they're pretty clearly private companies, not Public Goods. And as such, they can do basically whatever they want about speech on their platforms.

At which point does a service offered by a private company become a public good? There was such a transitioning point for electric power, for telephone service, etc. Will it occur for social media? And if so, at which point?

Google is a person, in the eyes of the law[1], and search results are it's speech (IIUC).

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#Legislati...

You misread the parent. It was not arguing that the government can't restrict Google's speech. It was arguing that Google can restrict speech on its platform, which is true.

I see.

The government I think could possibly use the commerce clause to impose obligation on a corporation certify its ranking algorithms which could lead to some extremely fun results.

A law that prevents google algorithm to (not)take truthiness into account would probably be constitutional.

how would that work any differently than share flag/report? People share when it confirms their bias, and flag/report when they dislike something.

Let's say identical articles get published in Huffington Post and Breitbart (since most journalism is reposting AP/Reuters/Youtube/Imgur/Twitter with a h/t at the end anyway, its not unbelievable.)

The HP article gets shared by the left-bubble and spreads rapidly. Now if The left-internet catches wind of a controversial Breitbart article, they attack. In left-internet the Breitbart article will perish, the HP, flourish.

Because there are 55 hundred million versions of the same article posted across thousands of sources, there are always variants of each story that exhibit each behavior in each community.

The word is 'populace'. Google says they are both composed of identical phonemes, but curiously enough, has a different recording for each.

My bad, sleep deprivation :)

Updated accordingly, thanks for the correction.

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