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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

A public square doesn't stop being a public square merely because it's privately owned. The reasoning in Marsh v. Alabama still seems valid to me, even if the court has softened on it in the past few decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama

When public communication is dominated by a few forums that happen to be privately owned and being banned from these forums ensures that nobody hears you, then actual practical exercise of free speech requires that these forums be viewpoint-neutral.

I'm convinced that all these people who show up on every HN and cheerlead for private censorship would be ecstatic about repealing the first amendment itself. Either you support the ability of ordinary people to express unpopular ideas as a practical matter or you don't.

I've met nobody with a principled commitment to free speech who nevertheless argues that the likes of Google and Facebook should be able to control the public conversation.

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The case you linked is about an entire town that was owned by one company, and that the ability to remove someone from your sidewalk for distributing materials doesn't apply in a traditional sense when one single private owner can essentially 'kick you out of town'.

Twitter is used by about 1 in 10 Americans and doesn't make decisions about who or what to restrict from it's platform based on Facebook's content moderation standards. IMO the idea that a handful of private companies with completely different business models and content moderation policies have a 'collective monopoly' on public communication is ridiculous.

> IMO the idea that a handful of private companies with completely different business models and content moderation policies have a 'collective monopoly' on public communication is ridiculous

I have the opposite opinion: these companies do collectively cartelize public speech. People who get banned from one platform are frequently banned from others soon after, especially if notorious. These companies also all have content policies prohibiting the same constitutionally-protected speech, e.g. on some subjects relating to the recent election.

Censorship doesn't have to be binary to be censorship: an environment in which your reach is reduced to practically nothing if you have one viewpoint and amplified into the stratosphere where you have the opposite viewpoint is an environment antithetical to the purpose of the first amendment, which is about creating an open and honest marketplace for ideas. Being able to talk about some idea in your kitchen but not on the internet is an inadequate level of free speech protection for today's world.

There's nothing wrong with requiring neutrality from social media companies. Common carrier regulations wouldn't violate their free speech rights: these corporations aren't speaking in their own voices, but are instead carrying the speech of others. And besides: corporations are not natural persons and we should abridge their rights in order to preserve the rights of real people.

>People who get banned from one platform are frequently banned from others soon after, especially if notorious.

Can you give us a few examples?

>These companies also all have content policies prohibiting the same constitutionally-protected speech

As someone has already pointed out to you, the constitution protects you from the government, not from the moderation of a private company who you choose to publish your opinions on.

>Censorship doesn't have to be binary to be censorship: an environment in which your reach is reduced to practically nothing if you have one viewpoint and amplified into the stratosphere where you have the opposite viewpoint is an environment antithetical to the purpose of the first amendment, which is about creating an open and honest marketplace for ideas

You just described every cable news outlet in the United States. The idea that freedom of speech means 'requiring neutrality' is just painfully misinformed. You can talk about literally anything you want on the internet. But you're conflating a few social media platforms with vastly different moderation policies, user bases, and business models into one mass of 'public communication'.

>There's nothing wrong with requiring neutrality from social media companies.

I couldn't disagree more. Who will be the decider in what 'neutrality' means? Because that's about as loaded of a political term as you can get in this day and age. I don't understand what an even remotely reasonable interpretation of this policy would be where individual private companies were forced to publish or barred from removing content that goes against their content moderation policy.

> Twitter is used by about 1 in 10 Americans

I feel confident that 1 in 10 Americans is more people than lived in the aforementioned company town. The relevant market isn't "America" but rather that audience on Twitter. Can you reach some of the same people via Facebook? Perhaps. But not all of them. And my suspicion is that the number you can't is still quite a lot larger than the number of people who lived in that company town.

That's not how that works. The point was that 10 in 10 Americans in that town had to follow the private company's restrictions because they controlled the entire town.

What you're saying has nothing to do with the analogy GP was making which was that the private company had a monopoly on sidewalks in the town, but Twitter doesn't control all of the sidewalks in town, it controls about 10% of them. And even if the aggregation of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Discord run about 90% of the sidewalks, those companies are all independent of each other and have their own business models and content moderation policies. Plus, new sidewalks are being built all the time. Discord and Reddit have grown in popularity vastly in more recent years, at what point do we add new companies into this tangled analogy, or take them out?

> What you're saying has nothing to do with the analogy GP was making which was that the private company had a monopoly on sidewalks in the town, but Twitter doesn't control all of the sidewalks in town, it controls about 10% of them.

They control 10% of the sidewalks in the country. That's way more than the company town ever did -- it's hundreds of towns worth of sidewalks.

And you as a speaker can't use the Facebook sidewalks instead of Twitter unless they had all the same people walking on them (e.g. were part of the same federated system), which they're not. If you want to reach your entire audience, you have to use both at once. Twitter can evict you from an audience bigger than Texas with no other way to reach them, and your argument is that a monopoly on Texas is only 10% of the country.

>it's hundreds of towns worth of sidewalks.

Yeah you're really not getting this. I'm not trying to be rude but you seem to not be understanding what I mean at all.

>Twitter can evict you from an audience bigger than Texas with no other way to reach them, and your argument is that a monopoly on Texas is only 10% of the country.

That's not my argument at all, the argument is that if the private company had only owned 10% of the sidewalks in town, the court would have ruled that they had every right to tell her to distribute her materials elsewhere(it explicitly says this was the reasoning behind their decision). It was only because one private corporation literally had a monopoly on sidewalks in the town that the court saw differently.

>And you as a speaker can't use the Facebook sidewalks instead of Twitter unless they had all the same people walking on them

But they do have the same people walking on them...

>If you want to reach your entire audience, you have to use both at once.

This is a bit of a catch-22, no? Your 'entire audience' is everyone that you can reach. If Twitter objects to your content, they can bar you from their (relatively small, to point out the analogy again) share of 'sidewalks', but there are still a vast number of other sidewalks 'in town' that you can advertise on.

>Twitter can evict you from an audience bigger than Texas with no other way to reach them

Who are these people that Twitter denies access to the rest of the internet? You are perfectly capable of reaching anyone who uses Twitter through another social media service, or setting up your own website/newsletter/Discord channel/podcast/blog/etc.

> But they do have the same people walking on them...

I think this is the part you're not getting. The set of people who use Twitter is not a strict subset of the set of people who use Facebook. There are people who use Twitter and not Facebook or vice versa. A large number of people.

> This is a bit of a catch-22, no? Your 'entire audience' is everyone that you can reach.

Not at all. Your 'entire audience' is everybody everywhere. If a given platform has a monopoly over any subset of people, they have a monopoly. Some people use Twitter and Facebook and Reddit, and none of them have a monopoly over that subset of people, but some people use only Twitter. And if Twitter was federated (like email) this wouldn't happen at all, because there would be no users exclusive to Twitter since you could reach all the same users using any other provider of the federated protocol.

> If Twitter objects to your content, they can bar you from their (relatively small, to point out the analogy again) share of 'sidewalks', but there are still a vast number of other sidewalks 'in town' that you can advertise on.

Which, again, the same people don't walk down, so you can no longer speak to them.

> You are perfectly capable of reaching anyone who uses Twitter through another social media service, or setting up your own website/newsletter/Discord channel/podcast/blog/etc.

You're saying that the company town doesn't deny you from speaking to anyone on the sidewalks of another town, so you can just have the people you want to speak to go to another town and speak to them there. The obvious problem in this case being that the network effect prevents people from doing this. You would have to convince everyone to move at once or hardly anyone does.

Sure I guess, you keep telling me I'm not getting it and then misrepresenting what I'm saying so I'm just going to assume you either don't understand or are just having a conversation in bad faith.

I guess your argument is 'your audience is literally everyone and if someone refuses to use a service besides Twitter you should be legally obliged to reach that person even if Twitter wishes to remove your content from it's platform for violations of their content moderation policy', which is absolutely insane to me.

>You're saying that the company town doesn't deny you from speaking to anyone on the sidewalks of another town,

That isn't what I'm saying _at all_, so I guess we're done here.

>If a given platform has a monopoly over any subset of people, they have a monopoly.

Also, I have to stress that this is just wrong. You just said 'Twitter has a monopoly over the subset of Americans that use Twitter exclusively' but it _doesnt_. Those users can choose to access your content on Facebook, Reddit, email, or anywhere else _with no obstruction_.

> Those users can choose to access your content on Facebook, Reddit, email, or anywhere else _with no obstruction_.

The network effect is the obstruction. It's a medium for discussion. You're on Twitter, having a conversation with a set of specific individuals. Some of them disagree with you and you are trying to convince them of your position. You are responding to public claims that they made about you.

Now Twitter decides that you're guilty of crimethink and you are invited to start your own website. But who is going to go there? The things you write there don't appear in anyone's feed as a rebuttal to the dubious claims being made against you on Twitter. If one person shows up to engage with you, they find no community and no multi-party discussion happening there, so they leave, and so does the next person.

And the people making the dubious claims against you are happy to see you go and have no reason to follow, because now they can preach to their audience of millions without encountering any criticism from anyone who disagrees with them. Meanwhile someone builds anti-Twitter which has all the same problems but a different political alignment, exacerbating the polarization of the country by preventing anyone from engaging with anyone who doesn't share the same set of preconceived notions, because both sites ban anyone who disagrees with The Preferred Party and there is nowhere that people with genuine disagreements can hash them out without one of them getting booted.

There's no absolute requirement for using Facebook to communicate with others over the Internet, so there's no sensible reason why they (or anyone else) should be compelled to host content they don't like.

Just because certain platforms are popular doesn't really change things from a legal or a moral perspective, and it might be because of their editorial discretion that they are popular in the first place.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Community_Access_C...

A more recent and more relevant precedent that cuts against your argument.

Btw I would be sad to see the first repealed, but I'm happy enough with Google and Facebook's moderation powers. So now you've met one person who has a principled commitment to free speech who thinks that Google and facebook should be allowed to moderate content.

I know the SCOTUS has walked back that precedent --- I said that I liked the reasoning in Marsh, not that I think it's still in force and not watered down.

As for your support for Google and Facebook moderation: don't you think support for the purpose of free speech requires that people be capable of exercising that freedom at a practical level? What's the point of the first amendment protections free speech protections when it's a dead letter from the perspective of message dissemination?

> As for your support for Google and Facebook moderation: don't you think support for the purpose of free speech requires that people be capable of exercising that freedom at a practical level?

The purpose of the first amendment is that the government can't throw you in jail for speech (freedom of speech, freedom of the press) and you can decide who you collaborate with (freedom of association). That's it. End of story. There's no thought or word put towards other people having to play nice with you about what you say.

> The purpose of the first amendment is that the government can't throw you in jail for speech

Why shouldn't the government be able to do that? What is the principle that motivated the restriction you described? The concept of free speech is a lot bigger than the government.

The motivation was that the government of the day did arrest critics and made certain speech illegal, depending on its mood.

And no, it's not deeper then that. The constitution is a dry document pertaining solely to organizing a government. It's the entire purpose of the document.

And what was wrong with arresting critics and making speech illegal? Thinking these things is bad is just some random whim the founders had with no additional thinking backing it up?

One day, people are going to see private censorship from social media companies as the same kind of antiquated barbarism. "Of course," they will say, "a few unelected managers in tech companies shouldn't get to control the public conversation".

The ability to speak without getting arrested in important because it's only by examining ideas that we separate the good ones from the bad ones. When social media companies make it impossible to have real conversations about certain ideas, they damage the ability of society to make good decisions.

You're diving of some deep ends and speaking concretely as if you have the answer about what the future humans will be thinking. Pretty sure I'm being Poe'd here.

IMO the purpose of free (political) speech is to prevent the people you are speaking from throwing you in jail for speaking about them. I could go into the various details of why I think moderation on internet platforms does not cause the same concerns, but you can probably fill in the blanks. If you can't, let me know and I can write a longer comment.

> IMO the purpose of free (political) speech is to prevent the people you are speaking from throwing you in jail for speaking about them

Go deeper. Why is it bad that the king be able to throw you in jail for insulting the king? You could make an argument that insulting the king undermines faith in the state and should therefore be punished. You can come up with an argument for anything. Why is it that we should reject this argument for king-insulting being a crime?

We need to be able to speak negatively about the king in order to change him. Also people like to be able to talk and don't want to be in jail for doing so.

Sure. We need to be able to speak negatively about our elites to change them. For example, we need to call them out when they're lying. The purpose of the recent campaign against "disinformation" is to make it more difficult to point out that the elites are lying.

The purpose of promoting free speech is to ensure that the ideas we adopt as truth are well tested against other ideas and correspond to some degree to reality. Mass social media censorship breaks the marketplace of ideas.

> The purpose of the recent campaign against "disinformation" is to make it more difficult to point out that the elites are lying.

That is not apparently true? Generally speaking the disinformation stuff is to prevent blatantly false conspiracy theories from being circulated widely? In any case, you're still free to talk about those ideas, you just don't necessarily have access to the level of circulation you might otherwise.

Historically, this seems pretty reasonable to me. When the constitution was written, if you had a fringe idea, you could shout it on the streetcorner and tell all your friends in person, but it was time-consuming work. Unless you had access to capital, you were probably not going to have your ideas printed and spread beyond what you personally were able to accomplish via direct communication.

I don't think the founders had it as a goal that every idea would be maximally disseminated. That's not what free speech was about, and, for me, that's not what free speech ought to be about.

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