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Comment by wooter | Hacker News Reader

Benjamin Franklin, a runaway, started his own newspaper - as did his brother - which were called far worse than "fake news" in an "objective" way by the british.

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What's your point? I doubt anyone argued that the British East India Company needed to act as a distributor for that paper.

my point is that anyone who explicitly refused to reprint Benjamin Franklin's writings on the realities of the US because they were declared fake and treasonous deserved to be called censorious and biased against freedom of speech. Mind you, more than a couple of his articles were actual fake news meant to stoke discussion on British policies.

So to be clear here, it was the British government declaring his speech treasonous and attempting to censor him?

If so then yes I agree. Government censorship is unacceptable. But that's not really comparable to private entities censoring on their own private whims.

For all intents and purposes, Facebook is the government of a large part of the internet.

What does this sentence mean?

In what way is Facebook at all comparable to a government? Is there some social contract that all people are entered into with Facebook? If so, what are the rights and responsibilities of that contract? And do note here, I'm talking about an implied social contract, not an actual contract (like an EULA).

What large portion of the internet do they "govern"? As best as I can tell you're arguing that any sufficiently large entity is essentially a government. That's ridiculous. So please, please explain what you do mean.

> Is there some social contract that all people are entered into with Facebook?

They have written community rules (don't know the exact name) that members are expected to comply with.

> What large portion of the internet do they "govern"?

The Facebook website (duh). Which, for a surprising amount of people, is literally "the internet" (or at least the part of it that they most interact with).

> As best as I can tell you're arguing that any sufficiently large entity is essentially a government.

No. For instance, Toyota is not a government because it does not set rules under which I can use their cars. Facebook does set rules under which I can use their platform, and it enforces them (which is the entire point of the submission). Setting rules and enforcing them is governance.

In fact, every moderator on any public forum is in the governance business. Since Facebook is so large, I find it reasonable to liken it to a government in terms of influence of its governance.

This entire argument is predicated on a misapplication of the term "government". Something that sets rules is not a government in the same way that an actual government is a government, and confusing the two interpretations cannot lead to productive discourse.

Just to be clear, this definition also makes Walmart the government of all Walmart stores, and me the government of my bedroom. Neither of those are in any way related to how the President is (a part of) the government of the United States.

That's why I qualified "for all intents and purposes" in my first post, and used "governance" in the second one. Walmart very much does govern its stores [1]. And a government is defined as the entity governing a state. States, of course, require physical extent, which doesn't exist on the internet, so yes, there technically can't be a government over virtual space (only over the physical space that the people using it inhabit).

[1] Edit: Within the boundaries of the law. But if that were a problem with your definition of "governance", then state governments (which operate within the boundaries of federal law) would not be governing either.

But the fear of censorship is that truth will be obscured. If free speech is being abused to do what we're afraid censorship will do, doesn't that create a contradiction in your logic?

And to be clear, what we mean by "fake news" are stories that are demonstrably false with incorrect information that's never corrected even when it's revealed to be false. We're _not_ talking about what Trump calls "fake news," by which he means any narrative that doesn't paint him in a positive light.

> If free speech is being abused to do what we're afraid censorship will do, doesn't that create a contradiction in your logic?

Irrelevant. Limiting speech doesn't solve that contradiction, it only guarantees the worse outcome. More speech solves your proposed "contradiction" just fine.

That seems like a distinction without a difference. Would you be happier with a system that pushed disproportionately more "true" speech at the vulnerable (ignorant) demographic?

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