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Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

It's also not their job to host everyone and everyone's content on their non-public non-government commercial platform.

Their job is to make money. Censoring world leaders from your platform is a sure fire way to lose a lot of users and money

I'm not sure there are metrics on that, I haven't seen any publication of such a precedent. I also wonder where those people might go, to the next-biggest platform perhaps? Or create a new one? And what about people that don't have a 1-to-1 relation to presence and consumption but a 1-to-many (i.e., friends, family). I suppose it's likely that someone might spend less total time on a platform if they have to divide their time between more than one platform.

FB has the metrics. The precedent is Cambridge Analytica.

That's great, but those metrics aren't available to us so speculating on that has little value.

We don't need the metrics ourselves to have common sense:

1. Facebook's job as a corporation is to make money

2. Making money for FB is largely based on MAU

3. Playing politics and censoring the chosen world leaders of large portions of their user base is a probable way to lose those users, and thus, money

I don't know what MAU means but I do know that humans are terrible at predicting things, common sense has little to do with metrics and, yes, of course Facebook's job is to make money.

The assumption that people leave assumes that there is a different place to go to, which for most people, there isn't because social networks are exactly that: networks. Unless you have a small isolated network that can move all at the same time, it is not likely that people will single themselves out.

But they are free to do so.

Yep. But it's not related to free speech, which is what the word censor is often used to relate to. (what with the lack of context, I'm assuming as at least suggested)

Censor itself of course can mean any kind of redaction, not just limiting freedom of public expression. Facebook has rules which they use to filter (and thus, censor) content on their platform. I'm not sure it has an exemption for a government person in there.

As much as many people hate the fact, he is still president.

I'm not sure what that fact has to do with that commercial social media platform and its rules.

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