Hacker News Reader

Comment by revnode | Hacker News Reader

> It's actually not that big of a deal to load an MP4 into a <video/> tag, turns out.

Kind of a big deal if you can't host that MP4 somewhere? If Google/Twitter/Facebook/etc. don't want your stuff ... chances are Amazon doesn't want to host it either. Even if you stand up your own hardware, you're at the mercy of whatever company is providing you the internet connection.

Free speech as a principle isn't about hearing stuff you like. It's about hearing stuff you don't like. That's where the tolerance part of it comes in. When you're tolerating something, it means you're putting up with it even if you don't like it.

And it's not about the law. Yeah, they can do whatever they want since they're private entities. It's about what values we choose to uphold as a society.

View on HN

> Free speech as a principle isn't about hearing stuff you like. It's about hearing stuff you don't like.

Free speech is not about the "right to be listened to," it's a very specific concept that means that the government cannot punish you or restrict your ability to make speech. If one person has a wildly unpopular idea, that is simply what it is: unpopular. To quote the first amendment of the United States Constitution:

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The true problem in all of this is that the right to "speak freely" is not something that was conceived thinking it would be possible to immediately transmit speech over thousands of miles to millions of people. We have so far enshrined corporations with protection and simultaneously not created any government backed properties for people to share ideas (akin to a digital public square).

If anything is a problem it's that there is no equivalent to a public square because most Internet forums are privately owned places. It would be like if the only land that people didn't own was the sidewalk to city hall.

Amazon isn't very likely to care what's hosted on their servers, as it's not as likely to be damaging - both in terms of brand and of legal liability. You don't know a website is hosted on Amazon Web Services the same way you know a video is hosted on Youtube.

It is knowable, by IP address.

That's... not the point. When you watch a youtube video, you have the youtube logo staring at your face. No matter how technically illiterate you are, you know you're on youtube. When your website is hosted on amazon, there's no component of the UI saying "Hey, we're on amazon property". Thus Amazon hypothetically hosting an Alex Jones website would be a lot less damaging to their brand than Youtube hosting an Alex Jones video.

> Amazon doesn’t want to host it either.

This is total bullshit. Amazon doesn’t give a fuck about what you’re hosting on an S3 bucket as long as it’s not illegal.

Also, Amazon is not the only storage provider in the world. Serving your bullshit to the world is definitely not an impediment or limitation.

You’re making it sound like all the major corporations in the world colluded to ban fucking Alex Jones. The reality is that he is probably too incompetent to figure out that he can build his own distribution without relying on major corporations.

But he doesn’t want that. Why? Because how else could he monetize his moronic bullshit?

Alex Jones is a drunk fuck who explodes the stupidity of his base with full knowledge and awareness about it. He knows the more shit he talks the more he can leverage his base to get financial benefits.

People defend Alex Jones on the merits of free speech and they fail to realize that you can say whatever you want and still be 100% factually wrong. So anybody has the right to refuse giving a platform to that. This is not about left and right, this is literally the difference between right and wrong.

You’re claiming that free speech is about hearing things you don’t like. Do you really believe that you’re entitled to an audience just because you have a right to freely speak about anything?

https://aws.amazon.com/aup/

They explicitly prohibit content that is "offensive".

"Offensive Content. Content that is defamatory, obscene, abusive, invasive of privacy ..."

Pretty sure he hits a few of those? So "Amazon doesn’t give a fuck" isn't quite right.

> It's about what values we choose to uphold as a society

> "Offensive Content. Content that is defamatory, obscene, abusive, invasive of privacy ..."

> Pretty sure he hits a few of those?

I have a hard time reconciling your two statements.

The slippery slope argument is great when you encounter a (seemingly) insignificant step in the wrong direction.

Banning Alex Jones on platforms is simply upholding societal values, by your own account.

You're selectively quoting me. I'm pretty sure I spent a bit of time talking about tolerance and what it means.

They could have easily said we don't allow illegal content and that would be the end of it. I would be fine with that. It would mean a jury of my peers would determine if whatever was said violated our societal values.

That's not what they said. That's not what any of them say. Instead, they very clearly state that they will determine what is and what is not allowed by their standards.

They are within their legal rights to do so ... but I am in no way in support of that. I do not want Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, etc. in charge of what we can and cannot say in public. We, as a society, should frown on that and those working in those companies should speak up during meetings when that is proposed.

I don't think I was selectively quoting you. You specifically brought up the part about offensive content and the examples they provide, and you yourself agreed he hit a few of those.

> That's not what they said. That's not what any of them say. Instead, they very clearly state that they will determine what is and what is not allowed by their standards.

This is in confliect with your quoted offensive content.

Sure, they will determine what constitutes the examples of offensive content, but at least in this case you yourself agreed with it, yet you claim you don't?

Again, make the argument when they do something wrong, not when they do something objectively in line with their terms and societal norms.

I might agree with you in principle, but I don't agree with the case put forth.

Quashing hateful, exploitative, conspiracy-theory-for-profit "free speech" is a societal value I can get behind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com