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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

Per usual, nerdy engineers think they know it all. For example: "free speech and paid speech are not the same thing" -- this is literally what Citizens United v. FEC decided. It's the same thing. Read the damn law. Ought it be the same thing? Who knows. Maybe, maybe not. Don't agree with the status quo? Get out there, hit the streets, knock on doors, and get the law changed. SCOTUS doesn't make laws, and Facebook sure as hell doesn't make laws.

But internet outrage and strongly-worded letters are a lot easier than actually organizing grassroots campaigns and getting people elected to Congress.

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This is exactly right. Although your suggestion that a congressional law would overturn Citizens United is not necessarily true. It's a difficult question given the basis of the original decision.

With that said, I'm rather surprised at how poorly constructed this letter is. If you're going to trot out trivial platitudes, you might as well go full bore and craft a persuasive polemic.

Instead this letter reads to me as a mealy-mouthed, mushy argument crafted by people who self-evidently favor paternalistic oversight when their letter does little to persuade me these are the people who should have any oversight over anything at all.

Ironically, if a politician of a favourable political persuasion linked to this letter in an ad I'm not sure how it could not be labeled as "misleading". It posits things that directly render many of the underlying "solutions" moot. The argument is broken almost immediately after it begins.

The best treatment of Citizens United I've seen is by Laurence Tribe - who no one of any merit would consider an apologist for Republicans or a textualist - in his book "Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution". The actual decision itself reads well and is worth everyone's time.

If memory serves, Laurence talks about his thinking on the case with Charlie Rose here: https://charlierose.com/videos/10259

EDIT: Now we see the parent comment being the most downvoted in this thread; with no one engaging with the content of the comment. Quite a sad state.

> This is exactly right. Although your suggestion that a congressional law would overturn Citizens United is not necessarily true. It's a difficult question given the basis of the original decision.

This is true, although an amendment could :)

I think it's obvious they were not asserting a professional legal opinion when they say "free speech and paid speech are not the same thing".

It's disingenuous of you to tell them to "hit the streets", I think that's basically what they're doing at their place of employment that has a significant impact on our elections. I'm not sure what more you want from them.

> Get out there, hit the streets, knock on doors, and get the law changed.

Isn't that exactly what these employees did? They organized and are trying to get the internal law (aka company policy) changed.

Your post misunderstands the fact that the Supreme Court's interpretation was brand new case law. They did in fact "make it up" when they claimed the constitution said something many, if not most Americans, would state it does not.

But more importantly your post misunderstands the fact that "free speech" for purposes of the constitution has nothing to do with free speech for purposes of running a social media site or free speech for any other purpose.

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