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Comment by nullc | Hacker News Reader

I don't follow your argument. Free Speech doesn't mean that anyone has an obligation to listen.

You can solve being saturated by noise on the listening side much better than on the sending side... much better because the listeners needs are diverse, because listeners must be robust against adversarial inputs (or otherwise the first madman with a random number generator floods you out), because the listeners time/sanity is what is at stake so that's where the incentives are, and so on.

The fight against entropy should be all of our missions but it can be accomplished without forcefully silencing people.

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"Free Speech doesn't mean that anyone has an obligation to listen"

Quite.

And those who have no obligation to listen include Facebook and Twitter. They are absolutely under no obligation to deliver any message you wish to send.

You won't get much disagreement from me on that basis though I wish that was the reasoning they gave-- rather than the transparently false statements about leaked documents.

I'm also dubious about applying that to private messages: Twitter isn't a party to those messages, interception of the content is an unlawful wiretap. Without unlawfully monitoring the content of the users private community it's not clear to me how they could be suppressing the content.

They are free to do whatever they want with any message on their platform, private or public. If they were regulated as a common carrier, this would not be the case.

I believe that Twitter and Facebook have no desire to be regulated as common carriers.

There is no way this is an unlawful wiretap, as they own and operate the wires.

This is absolutely not true under federal law (18 U.S. Code § 2511.) (also apparently CA PC 631).

It doesn't matter who owns the facilities. Except for certain narrow exceptions (warrants, government officers, jails, incidental operations necessary for maintenance) any unauthorized third party interception of a private communication is unlawful. Common carrier status is relevant for liability but is irrelevant for § 2511.

I think you are confusing a Twitter DM with a private communication. Note that Twitter is not intercepting your DMs, they are the ones transmitting and storing them.

I believe they should be treated as a common utility, because this is what they are because of network effects.

In that case, I think they would be under obligation to not silence people like this.

People are stupid. They're easily mislead. They make horrible decisions. Those decisions effect me.

> People are stupid.

But not people like you, of course.

> They're easily mislead.

That’s right. They need to be led by someone like you, instead.

> Those decisions effect me.

And your “stupid decisions” affect me. Which of us gets to subjugate the other, because the other is “stupid”?

See the problem, Colin? Where are you going to find these angels who will rule society for us? I’m not exactly eager to delegate the task to you.

Whoever owns the platform controls it. If you are sufficiently upset with that you can create your own platform.

And I’m free to criticize their censorship, and the way they lie about it.

If the only reply left is “Well, they can legally do it!” (assuming their lies about said censorship aren’t legally problematic), that’s very telling. It completely ignores the question of morality, especially when the platforms in question have so much control over society.

Lots of things are legal. That doesn’t make them right. In some cases, they’re very wrong.

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