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Comment by throwaway6274 | Hacker News Reader

Devil’s advocate thought experiment: suppose I was a CEO of a large social media company and my personal view is pro-life. Should I remove pro-choice posts (or censor them with violence labels), or should I allow discussion on the topic even though I personally disagree with it?

I don’t think people can have their cake and eat it too. Either the CEOs of these companies start imposing their personal views on their users or they try to make the platform as neutral as possible. In-between solutions are going to make everyone angry.

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Conservative Americans are traditionally all-in on respect for private property. One doesn't expect to go just walk on someone's lawn and put up a sign without the owner's permission. I honestly don't understand why the same respect doesn't apply to the services provided by private companies like Twitter and Facebook.

These companies spend billions of dollars annually on infrastructure and engineering to host user content. How can Republicans be asking the government to step in and dictate over that multi-billion investment? Doesn't that fly in the face of everything they believe about government's role in the private sector?

In your example, of course the pro-life CEO can do whatever they want with content on their site, assuming it was uploaded by users within the site's terms of service. If someone were actually paying for hosting of the content, they would have a case to get upset about having it taken down. But that's not the kind of contract that users of social media sites have made with the companies.

The point isn't to push a personal cause or belief. The goal should be to keep a safe space where people aren't allowed to threaten others and incite violence.

But from the view of the pro-life CEO, abortion is violence against an innocent baby, thus any pro-choice post was advocating violence.

The pro-life viewpoint considers pro-choice views to be advocating violence in the most direct way possible ("murdering babies"). That's the fundamental problem: there is a huge subjective grey area.

ok... you can chose to not take a stance on grey areas and act on clear cut cases.

I am pretty sure that's the _intended_ Facebook stance, and the disagreement comes over what's a "grey area" and what's clear cut -- which is what makes it a grey area to begin with.

I don't see how the tweets twitter added an annotation to could be seen as grey area.

> "ok... you can chose to not take a stance on grey areas and act on clear cut cases."

Eating meat is considered unethical by many and the fact that animals are often treated poorly by factory farming is not deniable. That's pretty clear cut. What ruling would you make?

Yet my meat comes from sustainable near-wild farms that enhance the environ, not a factory farm. Should I have to listen to some loud vegan breathlessly proclaim all omnivores to be vile and lacking in ethics? Everything is a damned grey area.

That's a self contradictory statement.

Yelling fire in a crowded theatre isn't protected, free speech.

Similarly incitement of violence isn't a political opinion to be agreed or disagreed with.

> Yelling fire in a crowded theatre isn't protected, free speech.

Yes it is [^1].

> Similarly incitement of violence isn't a political opinion to be agreed or disagreed with.

An incitement to violence is a specific thing, and it must be both specific and reasonably actionable. "Kill the Xs" is not an incitement to violence.

[^1]: Podcast with transcript. https://legaltalknetwork.com/podcasts/make-no-law/2018/06/fi...

That was a frustratingly meandering and low-density listen. Here's the substance of the episode, the rest can be discarded:

> Now that we have agreed that not all speech is protected, is this particular speech we are talking about protected? The answer is that first we start with a presumption that a law punishing speech for its content or message or subject matter violates the First Amendment.

> We look to see if the speech falls into a short list of well-defined historical exceptions to the First Amendment; obscenity, defamation, fraud, speech that’s integral to criminal conduct. And if the speech doesn’t fall into one of those narrow categories, the government cannot restrict it, unless it can pass that incredibly tough test called strict scrutiny, which is almost always fatal.

> So how much does saying you can’t shout fire in a theater help you in doing that analysis? Not a bit. It’s empty words. Every time someone says it I get a little more misanthropic.

If you want more background, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

So, as to whether it's illegal to shout Fire! in a crowded theater (which isn't on fire), I still don't know. The StackExchange folks lean toward it probably being illegal, especially if you end up causing a panic, depending on state. https://law.stackexchange.com/q/28853

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