Would HN be so proud of Twitter if they had refused to disclose the owner of an alt right account?
James Hetfield of Metallica said it best before he left the bay area "They talk about how diverse they are, and things like that, and it's fine if you're diverse like them."
Nope, First Amendment does not protect hate speech.
That said, there absolutely are types of speech that the First Amendment doesn't cover:
http://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/initiativ...
>>In this country there is no right to speak fighting words—those words without social value, directed to a specific individual, that would provoke a reasonable member of the group about whom the words are spoken. For example, a person cannot utter a racial or ethnic epithet to another if those words are likely to cause the listener to react violently.
See https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-... and search for "Trope seven".
In particular, application of "fighting words" pretty much requires that the speaker and listener were in close physical proximity, such that a fight could actually occur. Not really relevant to twitter, for the most part.
Exhibit A: "in 1977 a federal court upheld the right of neo-Nazis to goose-step right through the town of Skokie, Illinois, which had a disproportionately large number of Holocaust survivors as residents."
WP article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
No, but only because "social justice warrior" is a blanket perjorative for leftists, feminists, liberals, and anyone else right-wing antisocial types find annoying, not an actual ideology that people identify with, like nazism or white supremacy.
You can't suppress "social justice warriors" any more than you can suppress "cucks" or "landwhales."
No. While those terms are sometimes used by the left as general insults, they also describe actual movements, political ideologies and identifiable ideas.
However, "social justice warriors" don't actually exist, and the only equivalency that can be drawn between the views of one and the other, in the relevant context of free speech and censorship, is a false one.
But one term is to you, a blanket pejorative used by anti-social types, and the other is not?
I didn't mention "alt-right" and neither did the comment I replied to. Maybe you're reading something into my words that isn't there?
So you can't just say "This is speech, therefore it must be free speech." Advocating genocide and harassing people in minority groups are different in a very salient way from saying mean things about a politician.
If US govt. wanted to get at a Nazi / alt-right account in the same way, it would have been just as much of a problem.
And that’s why it works. And HN’s denizens are implicitly and often explicitly in favour of this.
HN stands for speech that is generally more free than, say, I would tolerate on a message board. But it’s not an absolute by any means.
Free speech is a great global idea: Somewhere on the internet, somebody ought to be allowed to rave about how the Negro is using rape to effect the genocide of White America. But free speech is not a great local idea: That raving doesn’t belong everywhere on the Internet.
Most people understand the distinction.
A lot of people here would probably read the "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" story from the 1980s, and complain about all the sexism.