Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

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I think this is a more nuanced topic than you're giving it credit for. While free speech does not classically apply to corporate enterprises like Facebook, as society shifts into the digital world the nature of communication itself shifts as well.

The 1700s and 1800s version of Twitter was standing in the street square, handing out pamphlets, and screaming your message. You were protected to say what you wanted to say via free speech. The 2018 version of that is online through tools like Twitter. By refusing to acknowledge this, we're actually experiencing a dramatic practical reduction in free speech rights without ever technically violating the Constitution.

It's really the ultimate loophole to the ultimate problem. Want to limit free speech? Simply remold society so that communication patterns across the entire nation change and become controlled by private corporations. Done.

A particularly dystopian and extreme imagining of this would involve the CEO of a company like Facebook running for President and controlling speech and news to an unprecedented extent in favor of his/her candidacy.

Hold up.

Somewhere between "handing out pamphlets in Hyde Park" and Twitter there were plenty of other shifts in communication patterns as well. There was a good 100 years or so where if you wanted to be heard you had to get your message into a newspaper, and then another 50 years where you also had the alternatives of TV and radio. All of these were controlled by corporate interests, and it's not like there was ever a right to have your Letter To The Editor published.

Pretty interesting point. One thing that pops out to me is scale, not just of output from these systems but also input into them.

For instance, newspaper, radio, and TV all reached unprecedented numbers of people, but they didn't bring the same scale to the number of folks contributing content. To use your Letter to the Editor example, a newspaper only has so much space, of which only a certain portion is allocated to displaying such letters. This means the vast majority of the country could never have their letter published just due to space limitations alone.

Modern social media like Twitter is notably different because it has scaled the input just as much as the output. Every consumer can now be a producer as well. The idea that anyone can be a producer is very powerful and is what makes it feel more like a public space than, say, a newspaper.

And this wasn’t a good thing. Presidents could literally intimidate journalists with exhibitionistic displays, confident that the matter would not be made public. (Lyndon famously flashed his Johnson at journalists demanding to know the rationale for the Vietnam War, saying, “this is why!”)

I don't think Twitter is analogous to yelling in a town square.

It's more like talking at a bar, where others can overhear you. Twitter can of course start throwing people out, but then it turns into a clique and will probably be eventually subsumed by the larger society that it ignores.

It's really not. You aren't entitled to an audience. Such bullshit. Put whatever you want up on your own website.

I can't walk into SirusXMs office and demand that they give me a channel so my voice can be heard. I'm not entitled to my own TV station.

I really wish one of these companies would just do something like ban Trump from Twitter so we can let the courts just put an end to this discussion. Getting banned from Twitter has nothing—nothing—to do with free speech. Nothing. Zero.

So what happens when a domain registrar seizes your domain because they don't like your speech? (This has already happened.)

What happens when your host and cdn shut you down? (This has already happened.)

What happens when your isp shuts you down? (Only a matter of time.)

Private companies control the Internet. If we decide social media doesn't constitute a commons, the same argument applies to the rest of the Internet.

And so, like the gp said, your practical right are greatly curtailed.

Moreover, you're giving Mark Zuckerberg immense, uncontrolled power over American discourse. Sure, he has to use his power carefully, but as long as he and other tech ceos do so, they've essentially become the gatekeepers of allowable thoughts.

Like I said in the original post, we aren't talking about ICANN or domains. That's a different discussion—one worth having.

Why is it different? How is it different? The behavior and impact isn't, is it? Can you give us something more than "it's not the same" because this response isn't wholly convincing.

How is it similar? I mean, we aren't even talking apples and oranges here. We are talking apples and toilet paper. One is public infrastructure run by a pseudo independent non-profit, the other a page on a private website. It's like the difference being banned from a city vs being banned from shitposting on the bulletin board in a Starbucks. Which, when we talk about free speech on FB and Twitter is really what we are talking about. Is there a constitutional right to shitposting and trolling on someone else's website? Like, really? Smh.

> It's like the difference being banned from a city vs being banned from shitposting on the bulletin board in a Starbucks.

The problem is that Facebook isn't the size of a Starbucks. It isn't even the size of a city. It's the size of a hundred cities. There are more users of Facebook than citizens of the United States.

It's like saying the US Congress can't impose censorship because you can just go to the EU and speak there instead. And if the EU censors the same things then you can just start your own country on a ship in international waters.

And who is going to come to your ship, or even find out about it, if linking to it is prohibited in the places where people actually congregate?

There is no town square equivalent where people have to walk past and can see you on their way to Facebook.

> We are talking apples and toilet paper. One is public infrastructure run by a pseudo independent non-profit, the other a page on a private website.

ICANN may be the top-level administrator, but the actual domain registrars are normal private corporations like GoDaddy and Google. What makes Google's domain registration service public infrastructure but not their video sharing service?

The scale point the sibling commenter made also drives to the heart of the issue - we can agree that I should be free to ban whoever I want on my private forum, but Facebook exists at a completely different scale that makes a qualitative difference in their impact on speech and society. The practical effect of banning someone or some type of speech on my forum is negligible. The practical effect of banning someone or some type of speech on Facebook is enormous. By giving Facebook that power (which they technically have, even if they aren't using it much now), you are handing them incredible power, maybe more power than any organization has ever had in history.

as I understand it, the Domain Name Registrars operate under government licences for all the various country-specific TLD's, and under a US government licence for the rest (for historical reasons). Some governments do operate very strict laws about what can be said on websites that operate under their country TLD, and use their ability to grant/deny a domain as a method of controlling speech on the internet.

That makes it protected under US free speech laws, because the authority to grant/deny a domain ultimately derives from a government mandate.

The ability to post random shit on Facebook does not derive from a government mandate, so therefore isn't covered by free speech laws.

That isn't true. Domain registrars in the US are free to terminate service or even seize your domain for any reason they like. Domain registrars are not bound by US free speech protections.

This is, for example, what happened to the contemptible Daily Stormer. There is no practical difference between a major domain registrar like GoDaddy or Google and a social media website like Facebook in terms of speech, except that at least if Google Domains shuts you down you can hypothetically (unless they seize/freeze the domain, which they have done) move to another registrar and the process is "transparent" for your viewers relative to being banned from Facebook...at least until they all run you off, with the most notorious example being The Daily Stormer again.

Thanks for the clarification. I was mistaken. I'm not sure why free speech laws don't apply, though. The registrars are operating under a government licence, so would seem to be covered by this? Anyone know why they're not?

I appreciate your viewpoint, but this is largely not a response to anything in my post, just a restatement of your previous post.

It is, because your talking about Twitter as if it's somehow analogous to a town square, and that's bullshit. It's not a public space and you have no rights to it or on it.

I am advancing the notion that there may be a threshold beyond which sites like Twitter are in practice precisely digital public townsquares. I am aware of what the laws are right now -- we are discussing here a hypothetical change of precedent or law in the future to better reflect how Americans communicate in 2018 and beyond.

No, you are wrong.

Using your own malformed analogy: The town square is the internet. Twitter is a private shop above subway station with a bunch of garbage that people like to buy. It's super busy. You can scream whatever you want in there, some people outside can hear you. You'll also probably get kicked out if you become obnoxious.

The “privatising public spaces” issue isn’t just limited to the internet. To understand the point better the above poster is making you might be interested in reading about how private malls became our de facto “public” spaces.

Legalese and dodgy analogies aside the above poster is focussing on the practical effects of these sites being so big and ‘default’.

On the other hand posting a dodgy opinion on facebook et al largely removes you from the social and physical consequences of saying things that are way outside of societal norms. When you're able to hide behind a screen the range of things you're willing to say increases as does your potential reach. I would argue it completely changes the context to which the ideas of free speech have been classically prescribed. Its worthy of discussion to question do the underlying ideals of free speech apply in this brave new world, or do we need to look at tweaking our ideals to fit the contexts in which we live. I don't have answers, nor would I ever suggest restricting free speech more, I'm just questioning does it make sense to apply it in this domain.

> On the other hand posting a dodgy opinion on facebook et al largely removes you from the social and physical consequences of saying things that are way outside of societal norms.

I get what you're saying here, but the sheer number of idiots "fired for saying X on facebook" makes me think it's not true. It lowers the barrier for saying something and increases your audience reach... but also lowers the mental barrier for saying the wrong thing or someone hypersensitive hearing it.

Have you ever investigated how speech is regulated in other countries? I'm Australian and we have a number of restrictions that make speech 'unfree' in the American sense. But I think they're appropriate and on the whole balanced well.

Precisely what was going through my head as I read the reply. Good luck with this one, I'm out.

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