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Comment by pexaizix | Hacker News Reader

>I would definitely not want the government to be able to control what ideas/speech is allowed on these platforms and what isn't.

I definitely want the US, with their strong ideas of free speech, to be the ones controlling those platforms. Because, as they are now, they are severely restricted.

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The thing about strong free speech laws is that it protects facebook and twitter's right to censor. Telling users of their platform to shut up is part of their free speech rights.

Free speech does not mean a guaranteed platform for your ideas, unless you are the owner of the platform.

Where did you come up with the idea that free speech laws give them the right to censor. It doesn't. Ownership and private property rights give them the right to censor.

Ownership and private property makes them liable for what happens on that private property, yet they are somehow exepmted from that liability. So all perks and none of the responsibilities.

That's a funny view. If someone comes to your bar and pushes another person's into a stool and kills them are you liable?

The government will absolutely entertain a lawsuit on those grounds, yes.

Whether liability and damages are assigned would depend on the details, but the principle is quite clear here.

The government often entertains strange pursuits in the name of justice. In the United States, a man was choked to death for selling loose cigarettes. That the state did it in the pursuit of the social contract doesn't make it right; and one should consider carefully the principles under which the state should pursue justice, with a careful eye towards how the state is liable to twist those principles to hurt the least politically empowered.

if your bar is running every tactic possible to keep you there and drinking and ignoring the consequences of it then yes i think they would have to answer for that.

That's a dangerous call to make. An Orlando nightclub once ran every tactic to keep its patrons there, and they fell victim to a predator. If the nightclub weren't working so hard to keep its patrons there, fewer people would have been victimized Are they liable? Why or why not?

They might be liable for not adequately protecting the patrons, for example. My uninformed personal opinion is that they are not liable in this case since they did have a security guard, but that guard is also being sued (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/06/0...).

Otherwise yes, it is quite possible to be liable for whatever happens on your private property. If drug deals are taking place between third parties in your house won’t you be liable? If you allowed those parties there you most definitely will be.

You're still punting the ethical question to a question of law. If someone is on your property and a car off the street swerves into your property and kills them surely you wouldn't be liable... or let's say a meteor hits your guest. Surely there is a limit to where liability kicks in. Where should that limit be and why

If your business is in letting the cars swerve onto your driveway then you will be liable. Don’t compare normal and regular human behavior on a platform to a meteor hitting the guests.

You have a poor understanding of free speech. If you use someone else's service/platform, you have zero right to free speech (certain speech is protected, but it's very limited).

The freedom of speech is specifically protection from government censorship. E.G., If you're publishing a newspaper the government can't come by and tell you what to say in it. The newspaper can publish (or not publish) anything they want.

Replace “newspaper” with “Facebook” or “Twitter” in your post and where do you end up? I think GP might have a better understanding of 1st Amendment than you give them credit for.

But Facebook and Twitter are the ones publishing, not you as the user.

I agree 100%. That's why I suggested that then-GP (now GGGP https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19167303 ) was right/relevant.

No. Facebook the company can publish or not publish whatever they want. They can censor you all they want. It has nothing to do with free speech as outlined in the constitution (which again, protects individual people from government censorship).

Somehow I must have typed my thoughts unclearly in my response above, because I agree 100% with everything you say immediately above (19171197). Facebook can censor whatever they want (IMO, private decisions on what to publish are inherently themselves a form of speech) and therefore the government is barred from censoring Facebook's publishing rights on First Amendment grounds.

If you take my suggestion (in 19168078), you end up with: "The freedom of speech is specifically protection from government censorship. E.G., If you're publishing <a site called Facebook> the government can't come by and tell you what to say in it. <Facebook> can publish (or not publish) anything they want." (For clarity, I agree with this 100%.)

The original post to which you replied (with expressed disagreement) said "The thing about strong free speech laws is that it protects facebook and twitter's right to censor." I also agree with that post 100%. It's your interleaved post's (19167743) first sentence in response to that ("You have a poor understanding of free speech.") that I disagreed with, given that that poster appears to hold the same point of view that you do immediately above.

I guess? it's a weird stretch. There's nothing specifically protecting what a business decides to censor other than the fact that the government can't engage in censorship.

>Free speech does not mean a guaranteed platform for your ideas, unless you are the owner of the platform.

Extorting the platform owner with implications that if they don't do as the government wishes they may compel them isn't exactly "freely given" consent.

The government has the ability to regulate many things, but threatening prior restraint of speech is a pretty bold claim, and perhaps content providers should call that bluff.

I think the government could modify safe harbor laws. Require sites above a certain size to minimize censorship to retain their safe harbor status. Eg allow everything that isn't illegal, is on topic, isn't advertisement, isn't spam and probably some other categories I didn't think of.

One of the big reasons these big companies censor things is because they're afraid of public backlash for being associated with certain types of content. If the government doesn't allow them to censor that content then the public wouldn't take it up with the platform.

>I think the government could modify safe harbor laws. Require sites above a certain size to minimize censorship to retain their safe harbor status. Eg allow everything that isn't illegal, is on topic, isn't advertisement, isn't spam and probably some other categories I didn't think of.

I think maybe it would be good to draw from the physical world. I'm not a lawyer but IIRC some states (eg California) let you leaflet on private property like malls if they're open to the public... I wish I could recall details but applying a similar logic online could be interesting.

But any modifications of safe harbor would worry me greatly.

Would you also be okay with your cell service provider censoring your calls and texts? After all, it's their platform you're communicating on.

Unless you're Norwegian PM posting Pulitzer-winning photos.

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