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Comment by maest | Hacker News Reader

Honest question, is this supposed to be written tongue in cheek? I can't convince myself whether it is or it isn't.

I think they’re serious but obviously poking fun at the incongruence where we castigate Chinese apps but are fine having domestic companies engage in similar behavior except it's not at the behest of the gov.

I personally think all speech should be free except those that advocate violence or break the law.

> advocate violence or break the law

Well I guess so much for the French or American Revolutions.

  > except not at the behest of the gov

Not so sure about that. Silicon Valley has some crazy ties to American intelligence agencies.

What I mean is, unlike the CCP, Congress isn't dictating what is permitted and not and what gets erased in a rather low-latency fashion. They're not telling the WaPo and Reddit and Buzzfeed to delete all posts or telling all apps and sites to remove content which makes Trump (or previously Obama) look bad... for starters and they're not controlling public opinion on social issues either as another example.

They have agendas, but they’re not dictated by the gov., although sometimes their respective agendas coincide.

It’s really not comparable.

I agree there's not the blatant censoring of info, but the government does put a lot of resources into controlling public opinion. Troll farms are a big thing, as well as exploiting connections in big tech and the media. There are also a lot of NGOs and political parties doing the same thing.

Poe's law is going to become so relevant that it's no longer relevant anymore. We live in a post-irony society.

A 'town square' law where a communications medium is ruled to be essential or of great influence (eg, Twitter) ensuring that free speech can continue to exist would be a positive thing.

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