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Comment by drocer88 | Hacker News Reader

20th Century Dystopian novels are now operations manuals.

It's very sad how many leftist are cheering on the censorship.

Forcible silencing of opposing views is a central tenant of actual fascism (not the kind of "fascism" that kids on social media accuse people of just for disagreeing with them).

History repeats itself, it would seem. This is a modern day book burning.

If we look at history and the Left then censorship also goes hand in hand with it.

The common factor is authoritarianism. Zizek makes a difference in that the left always consider the offender as just brainwashed and potentially redeemable (hence, siberia work prisons) versus the right as irredeemable and non human (hence, death camps).

You're misusing "fascism" as much as the people you oppose. There is a better word for this: totalitarianism.

See the paradox of tolerace for why people might not agree with you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Americans have a constitutional guarantee to free speech. They do not have a constitutional guarantee to use Reddit. Does that difference matter here?

No it does not matter, and I struggle to understand why anyone would think it does. There's no other context where every criticism of a private company gets countered with the argument that that private company isn't violating the constitution.

It matters in that we should not lobby congress to make reddit unban certain subreddits.

However, that does not mean we should not criticize reddit for not standing up for freedom of speech. You can't make your whole website based around "open and honest discussion" then ban subreddits where open and honest discussion was happening, but in ways you didn't like.

To be fair the argument isn't really that TD was where "open and honest" discussion would happen, rather that reddit is politically biased anti-Trump in selectively detecting rule violations.

Reddit is not a US government entity, so the US constitutional right to free speech is generally not applicable to discussions of Reddit.

The exception is the case where a US government entity controls an account that is a mod of a subreddit, in which case they would be subject to the First Amendment when performing mod duties such as deleting user comments or banning users. This specific case would burden only that user and would not place any additional burden upon the non-government mods or upon Reddit itself or its admins.

The difference between 1984 and 2020 is censorship is committed by corporations instead of governments. Does this difference matter? All Americans have to participate in government, whether directly by voting and holding office or indirectly by simply living in America's society of laws and its enforcement. Using Reddit directly is done voluntarily.

> as Internet pioneer John Gilmore puts it, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

I don't see it. Usually when the dystopia is overthrown, the survivors find themselves with the freedom to build what they want. Well, that's already the situation today. No one needs Reddit's permission to build what they want.

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