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Comment by timavr | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what is the right answer.

It is like we are stuck between two evils.

One is censorship, that is used by dominant group to silence everyone else.

Another is bunch of minority groups that might have outlandish aims and use free speech platforms to harrass everyone else.

What I don't like that it is left to private company to sort it out and enact their own policies. This questions should be clearly handled on legislative level. In the end of the day a company provides a service, they shouldn't be the judge of how much free speech is allowed/not allowed.

So I would say it is not failure of twitter here, it is just massive failure of our political process, but we all kind of know that already.

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the right to post on twitter, or even have a platform isn't a human right, it's not even a constitutional right, it's a 'privilege' the company gives you as long as you don't act like an idiot. Just like every web forum on the internet since aol and newsgroups in the 90s.

W/out twitter you lose a voice you'd never have had if Twitter didn't exist, so by them banning hate speech maybe if your voice matters you'll exercise some caution and prudence when making a statement.

The problem is that the same argument is used in dictatorships to ban people and activist from traditional media(print/TV).

Right now, what prevents Russian government/companies going to twitter and telling them look guys, you just banned your American extremists, can you please do the same for ours. They also practice hate speech, disinformation etc. The only problem is that Russian extremists look like average centrist US democrat.

In terms what is the right and what is not the right is not really for twitter to determine in this case. My point was it should be determine on legislative level what should be on twitter and what shouldn't.

In the end of the day twitter is a massive part of the political process. People exercising their rights, complaining to their representatives, supporting them, spreading their message.

So if you ban entitties from twitter, you ban them from political process. And I do think some entities should be banned, but it shouldn't be up to twitter, it should be up to us citizens to decide that.

If we think that holocost-deniers, nazy sympaphizers or whatever should be banned from social media bring it to the vote, pass the law, hopefully it will stand supreme court challenge and move on.

Not quite. The key difference is that dictatorships will also shut down independent publications they accuse of wrongspeech.

Nobody is arguing Stormfront should be shut down. In fact, the argument looks more like "Twitter is no more obligated to host the QAnon conspiracy theory than Stormfront is to host a weekly editorial from the head of the Anti-Defamation League."

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