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Comment by rootlocus | Hacker News Reader

You're not getting the point. They're not banning people, they're banning content. If the president tweeted: "Negros are inferior" that would be banned. If you tweeted "Negros are inferior", it doesn't really matter where you copied the tweet from, it will be banned too.

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Hold on, you dont think it absurd that, by the logic in your post, if I retweet something as newsworthy as the president tweeting "negroes are bad", that I will be banned as well?

This is exactly the kind of myopic mindset that makes me worry about twitter censoring speech. Not to mention how easy such censorship is to abuse in order to, say, craft a narrative...

Freedom of speech doesn't protect you to spreading hate and fear. And, of course, there's a difference between tweeting "the president said <...>" and copying it verbatim.

If you want to bring freedom of speech into this as a legal concept, then it does protect “hate and fear”. Twitter is not bound by such legal requirements, but they do claim to allow open political discourse.

> If you want to bring freedom of speech into this as a legal concept, then it does protect “hate and fear”.

Legally, nothing protects "hate and fear". That defeats the entire purpose of having laws.

> Twitter is not bound by such legal requirements,

How so? Every company is bound by legal requirements.

1. You're totally wrong about free speech in America. In the United States, "hate speech" and fearmongering are totally legal and protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has repeatedly and overwhelmingly so ruled.

2. Twitter is not bound by SUCH legal requirements, i.e. the requirement to allow freedom of speech among its users. The First Amendment only legally constrains the actions of the government (with very few exceptions, irrelevant here).

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