Comment by jim-jim-jim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jim-jim-jim | Hacker News Reader

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It does tickle me slightly to see people with generally progressive sentiments become flaming supporters of private property and free enterprise over the issue of objectionable political content, smugly pointing out that free speech doesn't apply to businesses and more likely than not linking to that stupid xkcd comic--as though the debate being held over "free speech" were strictly a legal one.

I don't know. Defending Nazis isn't the hill I'm going to die on, but I'm very wary of the "let woke tech corporations root out hate" approach. ToS violations are very malleable things and can be leveraged against other controversial viewpoints as well. There's a communist youtuber who has had his material taken down multiple times for making a silly song about the shooting of Tsar Nicholas II. Making light of a 100 year-old regicide is hate speech in Google's eyes. Reddit has likewise targeted very neutral and scholarly attempts to document jihadist media. Free speech is not compatible with free markets.

I wonder why you got voted down. I'd rather see a counter-argument to this than a greying of it.

Of course, the burden of justifying cutting out speech falls on those with the power and ability to do it. Today we all agree that white supremacy is evil and so on.

But in the 1950s half of America didn't mind that the other half had fingers pointing at them that they were communists. Jobs were lost, reputations sullied, jailtime given. It felt really righteous at the time, because, it was said, the communists were traitors and even potentially spies. A police state was established, perhaps not as severe as that of Soviet Russia or East Germany, but a surveillance state nonetheless.

During World War I we passed the Sedition Act, which made it a jailable, criminal offense to oppose World War I.

Go ahead, let's pile it on the white supremacists. But what happens when the same forces come for you? The same precedent: to protect the public, your views will have to go underground.

I speak as someone who is for all intents and purposes anti-fascist. However, I also speak as someone who recognizes that technology can make a far more repressive dystopia of limited ideas than Fascism of the 1930s was able to achieve.

I wish people had a better reading of history before they beat their chests with this shut down of hate speech.

The issue seems to be that people are conflating free speech with discrimination.

Legally speaking, businesses and people are free to discriminate against anyone that isn't part of a protected class[1], but many fail to understand that and assume it's some sort of slippery slope.

I argue that the progressives you mention have no issues with business discriminating against certain groups, provided they don't do it against protected classes. Objectionable political content, like inciting vololence or discrimination against certain groups based on their race has already been ruled by society as not ok. Hence why they're a protected class.

Certain groups such as LGBT are in need of further clarification as a protected class by the courts, as there are conflicting interpretations depending on jurisdiction. This is why the Colorado baker case is so important [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class

[2] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/us/politics/supreme-co...

Best...comment...here..

> smugly pointing out that free speech doesn't apply to businesses

Unless it is about wedding cakes, and then the business has no right to self-determine what they can or cannot put on the cake. I have a hard time understanding how a bakery is a public accommodation, but an internet registrar isn't.

I don't think the difference there is bakery v registrar, but protected classes v arbitrary groups. It's like at-will employment: you can be fired for any reason except these specific protected reasons (retaliation, age, race, pregnancy, etc).

A Gay couple isn't a protected class under under federal law, there are 7 protected classes based on: race, color, religion, national origin, sex, disability, and familial status. As you notice "gender" or lack there off and sexual orientation are not defined as protected classes.

that's still being debated.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/26/politics/doj-amicus-brief-titl...

Indeed, it also is more complicated than that since protected classes in the US (on a federal level) are defined by multiple laws and their protection status is not universal across all cases.

You may argue that familial/marital status is a protected class in the case of the gay wedding cake, the problem is that AFIAK (IANAL) applies to housing opportunities only.

You can argue in court that familial status extends beyond married/divorced/single/widowed but also to the type of marriage and then argue that the protection under title VIII of the Fair Housing Act sets a precedence for familial status being a universal protected class(this has been done for other protected classes in the past also).

But in either case this is a matter for the courts, until there is a ruling not wanting to serve a gay couple isn't a crime just "abhorrent but legal".

As a liberal I would much rather see the free market take over, and before people say well a free market didn't help to combat the discrimination against African Americans it wasn't the lack of a free market but regulation where you had local laws that demanded a 7 ft barrier between black and white areas in a restaurant and many other abhorrent local laws.

A bakery that wouldn't want to serve gay customers will be at a disadvantage in a truly free market as they lose business from people that they do not wish to serve and people who think that behavior is abhorrent.

I would also like to point out that on some level if I were in there place I wouldn't want to get a cake from a place that didn't want to make one but was forced to do so. A wedding is an important event, a wedding cake as silly as it might sound is a big part of the tradition, I would much rather take my business somewhere else than have someone who doesn't want to make a cake to be compelled to make one.

>Being gay is just like being a Nazi

It tickles me in exactly the same way to see people with generally conservative sentiments becoming flaming supporters of free speech and denouncing censorship over the issue of a non-governmental business making a business decision.

I'm a socialist.

I wasn't talking about you personally.

I am too.

What happened to Bat'ko (if this is the Communist you talk about) on Youtube isn't good. But I think there is a clear difference in what he was saying compared to, for example, The Daily Stormer.

But it's possible on a matter of principle to be against Nazi speech and applaud when it is removed. Being the victim of suppression of speech designed to liberate people (Socialism) does not mean that you must also be against the suppression of speech designed to advocate genocide and racism (Nazism).

Yes, that's who I'm talking about. And you're absolutely right about the difference between the two.

And believe me, I'm shedding no tears for the Stormer. If it never comes back we're all better off for it. I'm just unsettled by market-based countermeasures against "extremism" and the way some people seem to be cheering it on. In the case of Nazis it's not so controversial, but what if sites/accounts associated with Hezbollah or the PKK were targeted under the same terms? These are US-designated terror groups but there are plenty of people who see them as positive forces in their respective regions. Not to mention those who might have an unbiased scholarly interest in them.

EDIT @ ue_/etplayer below me:

Looks like people also can't directly reply to you lol. I agree with 100% of what you wrote.

I agree then; but it's partly out of the fact that we're using centralised technology to share ideas. It's right to be concerned when the discourse is controlled by a small number of peoeple who act out of the desire for profit, which is what's happening here. The quicker we can dispense of the idea that the "popular" Internet offers a "free market of ideas", the quicker we'll see people losing trust in the controllers of the "popular" Internet, from Youtube to domain registrars.

Reddit and HN don't help either; they propagate this idea that if your comment is with a negative score (disapproved of by two or more people), it's not worth listening to. They do this by taking measures to obscure your comment, such as making it hard to read (on HN) or hiding it below a button (on Reddit). The idea that an idea is only worth listening to because of its popularity is only less pernicious to the idea that an idea is only worth listening to if it brings the messenger profit.

Truth is being commodified.

(I'm the person you replied to but this is my alternate account, because the HN moderators have put a flag on my account since many months ago which stops me from commenting too quickly; it activates if I comment more than 3 or 4 times within half an hour, and then stops me from posting more than twice every two hours. How ironic.)

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