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Comment by jesssse | Hacker News Reader

We must protect the rights of "white nationalists" or whatever to organize and speak on the Internet. Free speech is for everyone.

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They have the right to organize and speak on the Internet. Not only can they, they can even do it on Twitter! The whole premise behind Gab is kind of a grift. Twitter is choc-a-bloc with white nationalists, many of them with blue checkmarks. The things that get people kicked off Twitter (most notably: targeted harassment) are ostensibly things that also get you kicked off Gab. Gab doesn't want you thinking too carefully about that, of course.

Also: beware the subtexts of brief statements about the rights of white nationalists that begin with "we must".

We must protect Free Speech as broadly as we can manage. Otherwise, one allows the gatekeeping of speech, and Free Speech is dead.

No, that logic doesn't hold. Free speech doesn't require private actors to enable noxious speech, just as the First Amendment doesn't require the government to buy you a printing press.

Free speech doesn't require private actors to enable noxious speech, just as the First Amendment doesn't require the government to buy you a printing press.

However, there are precedents in the law that show the US government prioritizes Free Speech over property rights. In 2018, allowing someone on your site is more akin to letting someone walk on your sidewalks than running a printing press for them.

I think you're confused, and that the precedent works in the opposite direction. See, for instance, Hudgens v NLRB. What may have you scrambled is decisions from other countries, or decisions that public officials operating pages under color of office on social networks cannot declare those pages to be private property.

If you're confident I'm wrong, can you please provide a cite?

There's Pruneyard, in California, which controls only in California and has been steadily whittled away by the California Supreme Court for decades. The trend in US law does not appear to be towards more expansive expropriation of private property to enable protest. Much more recently, Lechmere v NLRB held that private property owners can't be compelled to allow protests by non-employees (the employees of the company we're talking about have strong opinions about Gab in the direction you don't like.)

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