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Comment by BurritoAlPastor | Hacker News Reader

The Constitutional guarantee of free speech mandates the behavior of the government to not interfere with the rights of private actors. When a private actor (such as Facebook) chooses to publish or suppress content from a third party, that is a voluntary exercise of Constitutionally protected speech.

Social media services have neither a moral nor legal obligation to publish hate speech.

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Correct. But private corporations can choose whether or not to follow in the path of liberal democracy or authoritarianism in how they relate to their customers.

Facebook has more customers than any country has citizens so this question is of great importance to how their service continues to grow and impact the world.

> can choose whether or not to follow in the path of liberal democracy or authoritarianism

Liberal Democracy can also be authoritarian. The words you're thinking of are libertarian and authoritarian. Liberty as in free, authority as in ruled.

Do you not recognize that both words have the same Latin roots? It is only in the US where this illogical distinction is made because the word liberal has been bastardized.

"William Safire points out that liberalism is attacked by both the Right and the Left: by the Right for defending such practices as abortion, homosexuality, and atheism, by the Left for defending free enterprise and the rights of the individual over the collective."

It is so annoying to be DV'd without a rebuttal. Please make your case and we can debate the merits.

>> the kind of free speech enshrined in the U.S. Constitution

> The Constitutional guarantee of free speech mandates the behavior of the government to not interfere with the rights of private actors

Free speech is an ethical concept that is (imo) fundamental to open societies. The US Constitution enshrines this ethical ideal by creating a prohibition against government interference in free speech. GP is lamenting that major corporations do not seem interested in the ethical ideal, not claiming that the codification of the ethical ideal found in the US Constitution requires major corporations to permit certain types of speech on their platform.

I think it is an oversimplification to say that free speech is a general ethical ideal. As with many things, the Constitution is attempting to strike a balance. The check on restriction of speech is the prohibition of the government to restrict speech, but there is an opposite check as well: private entities are permitted to restrict speech. In the most extreme case, this means people can determine for themselves what is discussed in their own homes. There is a lot of tricky gray area between private homes and the public square.

When people's lives depend on your actions and policies, you have some moral obligations no matter who you are - a government, a corporation or just an abusive lone parent.

exactly. When Facebook reaches the size of a nation state in terms of its influence (and it arguably has exceeded this given how far the platform reaches) it ought to be held responsible.

Does anybody seriously think that any responsibility we demand from a actor like a government would go away if we'd write "limited liability company" on the door of the white house or congress?

The de-facto power relations are what matters.

This is so true and something that is confused all the time by “free speech advocates”. It’s quite frustrating actually.

I’m not happy about the amplification of speech that social networks offer, but l’m even more unhappy about the attitude of “smart” techies who shrug their shoulders and say “free speech - cant do anything about that”.

We can do something about that, but that would mean solving hard problems and not creating another way to type a few hundred words into a text box.

what would it look like to solve the problem of "free speech"?

im not asking you to give a full implementation, but i am genuinely curious what your vision for the internet would look like for a day to day user.

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