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Comment by ciarannolan | Hacker News Reader

> At this point I'm convinced Reddit's platform is being used as a propaganda tool, with the goal of bombarding users with the same views in every major subreddit.

It's not even subtle anymore. You can predict with 99% accuracy the ideology of any political statements in content on the first 10 pages of r/all. It's a 52M daily user echo chamber.

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And anyone with a dissenting opinion is chased off of the site. I had to stop using it over the staggering amount of groupthink and censorship.

Didn't they champion themselves as the bastions of free speech at one point?

> Didn't they champion themselves as the bastions of free speech at one point?

Didn't liberals too?

No one has a right to a private platform.

Facebook banned QAnon, so did Youtube. They can, frankly, fuck off.

Public good is a consideration.

This is how I'm afraid free speech dies.

The internet becomes privatized, and therefore - free from those pesky free speech laws.

Really? Because there is site moderation on hacker news too. I am sure if you breach them enough, you will find yourself unwelcome.

QAnon is free to start their own website and say whatever loony shit they want.

and then there will be calls for Cloudflare, AWS, GCP, Azure, Fastly, Digital Ocean, ICANN, etc. to ban them.

Which, unfortunately, would only further reinforce their narrative and confirmation bias.

That's not my problem. Seems worse to force companies to do business with groups like QAnon.

Freedom of Speech vs Freedom of Association, which do you support?

I support free market with oversight. I believe shadow banning should be made illegal, but that companies should be free to decide if they want to block certain viewpoints. If a company blocks something like QAnon, then that is part of free market to create a new niche for people that are into fringe conspiracies that allows those viewpoints. Additionally, if a company wants to block liberal ideas then a market can exist for those who share similar ideas. The idea that these companies have to allow all speech is ridiculous, and I don't see people trying to enforce the same idea of free speech in other places of business like grocery stores, restaurants, etc where someone could start shouting some conspiracy about Democrats eating babies in the basements and not be asked to leave.

Yup, basically anything either left or right of center is kicked off the platform. And even then they're very pick and choosey over that stuff.

Reddit has increasingly become the 21st century equivalent of a tabloid: nudity, misinformation, and sensationalised bullshit

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