So HN can't remove posts either because that violates free speech? I grew up on the internet too and forum bans were always a thing. You haven't convinced me this is different.
Sometimes I agree with things a lot of people here clearly disagree with and I'm fine with that. I can decide to either argue my/their case or move on and accept we have different views. Maybe sometimes seeing things heavily downvoted here changes my mind on subject as well and question if my views are right or not.
We can't all agree about everything all the time. Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm wrong. We all are, nobody is ever 100% right, 100% of the time. I sure as hell don't want somebody else controlling everything I see and read because they think it might give me the "wrong" ideas. I'm an adult and I should be allowed to make my own mind up and most importantly question things, as should everybody else, regardless of education level or where they "fit" into society.
When I think about all of the forums and comment sections I regularly interact with, the ones with the most open, democratic, free speech, with little to no direct moderation seem to be the most engaging, tolerant and frankly, nicer places. I've given up on engaging with anything that's heavily moderated or frankly, blatantly biased - Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and I feel a lot happier.
‘I would rather have questions that cannot be answered, than answers that cannot be questioned’ - Richard Feynman.
Well, besides the usual "who decides what's 'blatant spam or crap'?" response to the "it's only bad stuff that gets censored", I'd suggest you haven't really been paying attention, then. Take a look at dang's comment history[1] and you'll see a lot of warnings before ban but also plenty of bans and references to previous bans, usually for substantive, not spam, reasons.
If you were to take the above at face value, would this change your perception about the value of moderation in online communities?
Personally I think downvoting is the appropriate response to say "this is not interesting or relevant to HN", but many have realized flagging provides outsized influence.
This whole sham of using Twitter is a freedom of private speech trick he uses to facilitate ambiguously mixing occasionally factual official statements with trash "protected" speech.
If anyone holds his feet to the fire for tweets, he can simply claim he was acting as a private citizen stating an opinion - obviously the president of the united states wouldn't use twitter for official business!
I look forward to seeing how history treats this embarrassingly incompetent era of american politics.
I'm calling/writing my congress-critter today to ask that they look into doing exactly this
Personal accounts should be subject to the same rules as everyone else. Give official government accounts special treatment; can't be banned, no censorship, etc..
Official government statements should come through more secure channels than a privately owned and operated web site that arguably resembles a 21st century tabloid where people's accounts are regularly hacked or otherwise taken over, and both censorship and access are arbitrary and unregulated.
Just today we have an example of a C-SPAN political editor admitting to having lied about their Twitter account being hacked to abdicate responsibility for comments they made on the platform [0].
Such claims would not only be unbelievable coming from secure government owned and operated channels, but would be damming to the administration should they honestly occur, incentivizing running such services properly without such vulnerabilities and with an immutable audit trail.
Furthermore, if a .gov provided forums for open public discussion in response to official statements, they would actually be protected under the 1st amendment. Unlike on private platforms like Twitter, where arbitrary censorship and blocking of discussion/access is perfectly legal.
All of this junk occurring on private websites like Twitter/FB is completely misguided and a tremendous disservice to the American public.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/15/media/steve-scully-cspan-susp...
> immutable audit trail
This would be amazing because knowing that something is un-delete-able might cause some politicians to take a pause and think about what they're saying. Some. Lol.
This can be done today. An application communicating via an open and federated social protocol can be stood up on government infrastructure/DNS namespace. These systems already exist and work.
This situation is very much a double-bind. In this case, someone gets to make noise about the "truth they won't let you see" and claim bias.