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Comment by paulchap | Hacker News Reader

> I think it's dangerous when platforms function like a public utility and is yet allowed to do whatever it wants because it's _technically_ private property.

It _is_ private property. The companies in question are just exerting their rights. The users agreed to the ToS while signing up, and it's perfectly reasonable for them to cut off your access to their service, as long as it's within the legal bounds of the ToS. I don't think companies should be directly regulated/penalized for banning users. I do think however, that people should be more conscious of what they're signing up for. Consumer protection law should protect consumers, not their convenience.

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> It _is_ private property. The companies in question are just exerting their rights. The users agreed to the ToS while signing up, and it's perfectly reasonable for them to cut off your access to their service, as long as it's within the legal bounds of the ToS.

So by parity of reasoning, companies that pollute within the bounds of the EPA's restrictions are also perfectly within their legal rights, and so shouldn't be chastised or further regulated, right?

Of course that's nonsense, because we're all interested in a better civilization, which occasionally means reviewing and accounting for the negative externalities of which we might have been previously unaware.

So please stop using this point against people raising concerns over how corporations are acting. There are legitimate concerns over the negative externalities of policing speech and banning people on private platforms with no recourse for appeal.

Your argument makes no sense. It's a complete non-sequitur unless you want the federal government to enact laws that enable them to micro manage every form of communication.

That would get laughed out of the SCOTUS in an instant.

> It's a complete non-sequitur

It's quite literally not a non-sequitur. The parity of reasoning in both cases is clear: they are the same argument, I just swapped the details.

Every good regulation is intended to address some negative externality. Before a regulation is enacted, people point out the negative externalities and how they're harmful and that we should do something about them. Maybe they have some idea what that entails, maybe they don't.

You can't consistently dismiss such concerns by arguments like, "it's private property", while simultaneously supporting other regulations, like those enforced by the EPA, that also restrict one's rights to use one's property.

> unless you want the federal government to enact laws that enable them to micro manage every form of communication

I don't know what a good solution would be, I just know negative externalities in this case do exist. You can continue to deny them, you can accept that they exist but deny their importance, or you can accept they exist and that they are important, and so participate in a dialogue about how they should be addressed.

I don't think that laws that dictate companies how they have to manage their property are inherently bad. > Consumer protection law should protect consumers, not their convenience. My comment was targeted at the claim that mild censorship on privately owned platforms should be regulated in such a fashion, because their users depend on it. If you sign up for something, you should know what you sign up for. It's perfectly alright if you disagree with their measures. That doesn't mean you should call upon a body of law to penalize them. If Mrs. Fisher doesn't like the fact that her landlord is asking her to lock the door on her way out, she shouldn't be lobbying for the OPEN IT act. She should settle matters responsibly, or... move?

Basically, I'm just saying I found the grandparent a bit... overkill ;-)

> My comment was targeted at the claim that mild censorship on privately owned platforms should be regulated in such a fashion, because their users depend on it.

If this incident happened in a vacuum, I would agree. Unfortunately that isn't the case. The censorship ranges from mild to extreme these days, and now even the mild cases drive the wedge deeper. The unrest in the US is only just beginning I think.

Anyway, the post to which I initially replied is a common response to private censorship, and the irony of arguing that private companies should be able to do anything with their private property apparently escapes most people who make it. "Oh, private property, right. So let's eliminate the minimum wage then, because that money they wouldn't otherwise pay to fill a role is the corporation's private property. No? Is private property suddenly not the only thing that matters?"

Private property is not the only thing that matters, but Congress cannot taking away a company’s free speech rights, per the constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court.

You might not like it, but that is the current reality. Personally I like it. I would much rather have corporations decide which speech is allowable on their platforms than have the government decide which speech is allowable.

> but Congress cannot taking away a company’s free speech rights, per the constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court.

This is not quite correct. Corporations used to be bound by their own charter until Congress relaxed those restrictions. Congress makes the rules under which corporations can operate. The Supreme Court ruled on how the current rules should be interpreted against the Constitution, but those rules are fairly arbitrary.

In any case, I'm not even suggesting "taking away their free speech rights".

> I would much rather have corporations decide which speech is allowable on their platforms than have the government decide which speech is allowable.

This is a false dichotomy.

The implicit argument that an inability to display Confederate flags on others' property generates comparable negative externalities to environmental damage is certainly a bold one, and not, I would argue a better one than the more usual argument that private entities are bound to facilitate freedom of speech by the US constitution. You'd have a tough time persuading me any externalities generated by user generated Confederate flags within computer games were positive at all, still less that they were sufficiently positive to warrant government intrusion in the moderation process to protect them.

(Sure, there are slippery slope arguments about what happens if speech is not permitted on any media or if media companies are permitted monopoly power, but since Forza car designs are pretty far from that scenario, government intervention based on the assumption that computer game-designers do not have rights to curate their world or that displayers of the Confederate flag deserve special protections falls down much slipperier slopes of eroding property rights or enforcing [unpleasant] speech)

> The implicit argument that an inability to display Confederate flags on others' property generates comparable negative externalities to environmental damage

Attack the strongest interpretation of an argument, not the weakest. Your choice to focus on this flag incident and ignore the wider context that I described of platforms of all kinds censoring speech and banning people reveals the flaw in this sort of response.

This is but one more example of a trend, and the trend is what should be alarming. One should rightly be suspicious of any claim that a specifically bad storm, or a specific heat wave was caused by global warming, but one should be very alarmed at the growing trend of worsening storms and increasing incidents of heat waves.

Has there ever been a time when businesses didn't ban users from saying and doing things they didn't like on their property? The only trend seems to be that this time it's perceived racism which is the target, rather than stuff perceived as being vulgar or blasphemous or against their family values or age inappropriate or off topic or too critical of the platform owner, and you'll have trouble convincing me that this time [and especially this particular instance] it's not considerably less alarming than most existing forms of corporate moderation.

> Has there ever been a time when businesses didn't ban users from saying and doing things they didn't like on their property?

Sure, happens all the time. You think waitresses and restaurant managers like belligerent customers? They often tolerate them anyway.

Like I said, this specific instance wouldn't concern me at all if it weren't for the over-arching trend, and my post was specifically targeting a (frankly hypocritical) type of reply that comes up every time this topic is broached.

> "It _is_ private property. The companies in question are just exerting their rights."

So is Facebook and yet those applauding this are up-in-arms about FB's policies. Seems like a double standard.

No, it's really not. I can be very unhappy with what FB is doing and want it to change without disputing in any sense that it's their right to have that policy.

>perfectly reasonable for them to cut off your access to their service, as long as it's within the legal bounds of the ToS. I don't think companies should be directly regulated/penalized for banning users.

I don't believe you really meant what you said there. Private companies aren't allowed to ban users because of their race. Do you want them to have that freedom and allow segregation? Or perhaps you only accept that because it's already the law and you would have opposed civil rights laws had you been around before they were introduced?

I realize you've made a weak straw man argument here, but there are important distinctions that need to be made in discussions about platform/user base moderation. While there are classes of people protected from discrimination by civil rights laws, what is not protected is discrimination or refusal of service for customers based on what they do rather than who they are. Banning someone for cheating, harassment, circumventing moderation, etc is not comparable for banning users of a certain race, and even attempting to equivocate them is a weak argument.

Sure. But Paulchap made a general statement without any of those distinctions. People often make such broad statements of belief when they're trying to make their position sound powerful and important but end up contradicting their actual beliefs. If you restrict it to a certain case or list a bunch of exceptions, it sounds less fundamental or important and makes it look more arbitrary. But that's more honest.

Most people's beliefs about right and wrong are arbitrary, not based on any fundamental principles, and there really isn't much of a defense for them other than "well, that just happens to be what I believe."

Paulchap literally said "as long as it's within the legal bounds of the ToS".

Discrimination against race or another protected class falls outside of the "legal bounds of the ToS".

They already accounted for the case you're trying to argue against.

Yes. Like I said, if the law allowed it, he would support racial discrimination too, according to his statement.

That's the most liberal reading of a statement I've heard in a long time.

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