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Comment by A4ET8a8uTh0 | Hacker News Reader

I am genuinely upset over this. And that is after CEO pinky swears he will not do it in the future. It will be that much easier to do it now that there is a precedent. I doubt he does not know it.

I think.. I think I will be starting free speech focused entity. Like NRA. Laser focus. No restrictions on free speech of any kind. Ever.

This may be the only thing to prevent US from losing its list of temporary priviledges.

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Even CP? I don't think you've thought this all the way through.

that is not free speech though, that is explicitly illegal.

Free speech does not require that we give people a platform. Free speech also means that everyone can decide to turn their backs on people saying these sorts of things, and not let them use the things we have built to spread their message.

>Free speech does not require that we give people a platform.

That's true!

Unfortunately it gets a little more complicated than that.

As providers enjoy PLATFORM protections that align with the ideas of free speech. Meaning they will enjoy legal immunity from content they host so long as they won't decide who gets a voice or why so long as the content is legally allowed. They aren't liable because they didn't have a say in what it was. They are required to remove illegal things of course.

The issue here is the PLATFORMS are now deciding they're going to keep these legal protections they basically require in order to exist - while also acting a PUBLISHERS that curate otherwise legal content to be aligned with their views.

Admit that many of the same people celebrating "they're a private company they can do what they want!" were also yelling "make the cake you bigots!"

This may be a cake-centric issue now that I think about it. Because CF, SV, FAANG are Having Cake + Eating Cake.

Cloudflare is not acting as a publisher.

Are they curating otherwise legal content because they don't like it? Isn't that the topic here? Help me understand.

It’s not clearly legal and Cloudflare is under no requirement to provide its service to everyone that wants it.

I think it is ridiculous to hold the position that you aren't allowed to block ANY content if you don't want to be held liable for things people say on your platform.

We can't hold a platform liable for content because it is technically impossible to perfectly block infringing content, so we realize it is unfair to hold platforms accountable.

However, this doesn't mean a platform can't make ANY effort to control what content is on their system without losing this protection. YouTube doesn't lose safe harbor protection just because they have contentid...

Why? Those publisher protections are directly modeled after the first amendment. This was literally the idea.

I didn't make this up, it's the entire intent of the system.

If we are talking about the DMCA safe harbor stuff, which is what I was talking about, it was not modeled after the first amendment at all. What makes you think they were?

I would have agreed not that long ago, but a lot of those platforms became defacto public squares. You do not get to benefit from a public good without burdens that come with it.

What public good are they benefiting from?

Being a defacto pulic square is what they benefit from. I get where you are going with this so can you move to the point you clearly want to make?

Your definition of a public good does not fit at all with what the accepted definition is, so I am not sure how to argue with you.

They are in no way using a public good, so arguing that they need to follow the rules that we place on public good doesn't make sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good

We're so glad you consider that more important than the continued shootings that only the US seems to suffer from on a frequent and permanent basis.

That free speech is sure making a lot of people free right.

Freedom of speech IS more important than few dead people. This entire country was founded on this particular issue. People went to war for it.

So there is no need to be glib here.

There are societies which are in practice far more free in their expression of speech and which are at the same time substantially safer.

There is quite evidently no move to legally curtail any freedoms. Nor are the restrictions put on by these companies in any substantially onerous or making free speech impossible.

> No restrictions on free speech of any kind

I'm not aware of any country which allows for speech with "no restrictions"

I am saying. Like with NRA's second amendment, absolutist position must be taken since compromise clearly does not work.

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