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Comment by wtdata | Hacker News Reader

My problem is actually: who gets to draw those lines and how can I be sure they won't use that power to serve their own personal interests.

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Private companies draw those lines, as they always have done. This is GoFundMe. They also have a ToS that specifies what you're allowed to have on their service, so they've done this for as long as that ToS has existed. Anti-vax people can use some other service or create their own.

This is gimmick I keep hearing "Private companies", that is your slippery slope.

The government doesn't _need_ to censoring anything if they get the companies to it for them.

That is fascism.

>That is fascism...

So is telling private companies what they have to do with their property.

Yes, I agree, it goes both ways.

'Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power' ― Benito Mussolini

Here's an alternative slippery slope:

I run a site that makes it really easy to connect people who want to give money and people who have some reason they think they should have money. I decide that I don't want people who are raising money for anti-vax campaigns on my site, so I ban them.

Then, someone comes in and says "no no, you can't do that, you have to allow them to use your site." Who gets to decide that, and by what criteria? What if I also decide I don't want to allow anti-government militias to use my site to buy firearms? As soon as you force a private entity to do business with people even if they don't want to, you're also on a slippery slope.

...or maybe you're not. Maybe there are plenty of plaes to draw these lines, like, "you can't refuse service to people if you are doing so based on certain categories, like race, sex, religious belief, etc. because we as a nation have decided it's important."

I think we should allow companies like GoFundMe to ban whomever they like, unless they are discriminating based on the protected categories that are already clearly defined.

I agree with you, GoFundMe should have the freedom to do whatever they want.

I am just pointing out that there is no longer any real censorship any more that we are legally protected against simply because the government is never involved directly in it.

So simply repeating the mantra "business can't censor" isn't really true in a strict analysis.

Consider that the baker who didn't want to bake a cake with words on it that he objected to was sued (successfully). But I saw almost no support for _that_ business's freedom to choose.

Censorship has turned into a mob tool of control.

> I am just pointing out that there is no longer any real censorship any more that we are legally protected against

Businesses have been refusing to do business with people and people have been refusing to use businesses for a very long time, this isn't some new thing.

And we actually do have protections, enshrined in civil rights legislation. You can't be denied service because of your race, gender, religion, and a couple other categories depending on the service and the state. But your stance on vaccinations is not a protected category. If you want to expand the protected categories, that's a different conversation.

> Consider that the baker who didn't want to bake a cake with words on it that he objected to was sued (successfully).

Yeah, because sexual orientation is a protected class.

> Censorship has turned into a mob controlled tool of control.

You're describing a boycott. It's a form of protest. It's "mob controlled" in the same sense as all other forms of protest

So if the government mandates it, then it's specifically the government censoring things.

If the company chooses to do so, then this is a non-issue. It's no different than YCombinator banning someone who decides to spam the comments. Or Youtube banning a channel because it's posting porn videos. This is literally the same concept as that, except it's GoFundMe with anti-vax.

> who gets to draw those lines

Free people. There is a legal line that circumscribes the lines that cannot be drawn. You cannot decide not to do business with someone on the basis of gender or of race, for example.

But if you don't want people jerking off in your restaurant, you're free to kick them out. Same for people spreading bullshit. (Though, importantly, the government can't do anything to the bullshit-spreaders.)

It's obvious that private companies should draw their own lines. That's the entire point of private property, as long as it's not unconstitutional, they can do what they like. It's their property.

And of course they do it in their own interests, that's the duty of a fiduciary.

On one’s own property, it should be the default that one may draw the line where one pleases. Or delegate one’s authority to agents — employees — who will handle the question.

As far as your personal interests go, again the presumption should be that if it isn’t your property, and you have no contracts stating otherwise, it isn’t yours to decide whether a decision is made in your own personal best interest.

The entities who own the platforms draw those lines on their own platforms. If they want to use that power to serve their own personal interest that's their right to do so.

We have been down this path. It's a collusion. And it is bad.

1. Gets removed from a platform and told go makes your own platform!

2. Goes makes a platform.

3. Gets removed from the DNS. Told to become his own DNS host.

4. Makes DNS service.

5. Gets kicked off the cloud hosting. Told go make your own hosting.

6. Gets his own hosting.

7. Gets blocked at the payment processing. Gets told to figure out how be his own payment processor.

Somewhere there there's also apps being pulled from Playstore and iTunes.

This will bite us in the butt. Pendulum always swings both ways and we will be on a receiving side of it in future.

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