ACLU released a statement condemning Big Tech’s censorship of Trump | Hacker News Reader

ACLU released a statement condemning Big Tech’s censorship of Trump

twitter.com

28 pointsbra-ket14 comments

The only websites Google finds in the last 24 hours with the quoted statement are Newsweek and Washington Times, both citing that Tweet.

According to Kim Zetter, a well known mainstream and tech journalist [1], the ACLU sometimes emails statements relevant to breaking news to journalists without posting the statement online themselves [2]:

> People: the ACLU statement about Twitter/Facebook ban I tweeted is real. It was emailed to media from their spokesman. Just because it’s not on their website doesn’t mean it’s fake. They don’t always post online statements they send media to be included in breaking news stories

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Zetter

[2] https://twitter.com/KimZetter/status/1347960620914671616

I just browsed https://aclu.org, seeing nothing of the sort. No idea what the tweet says, because Twitter is broken for me ( something about JS ).

I think recently twitter decided to not function with JS disabled. Perhaps someone can confirm.

Oh, I know about that. I just don't care.

A fun fact is that they do still return useful content in HTML meta tags (and frankly, only the useful content is present there) if you disguise yourself as a link expanding bot from Slack/Facebook/etc.

Perhaps that's gonna be the new paradigm to browse the Internet in a lightweight way.

Why not link to the statement?

Because the goal here is to promote speech about fascism, not speech in general, and linking to a fascist gets more publicity for fascism.

The statement from the ACLU. Not the statement from Trump.

The link should be to the ACLU's statement, press release, blog, etc, not some third party quoting an alleged statement without reference.

Sorry, that was unclear. I mean that the third party is a fascist, and so linking to the third party instead of the ACLU promotes him.

That’s hardly a condemnation. The ACLU is just using this as a jumping off point to discuss the broader issue of social media companies’ power over online speech.

If we condemn it for one, we must condemn it for all. Or is egalitarianism (even for the worst people) no longer a principle most people uphold?

We condemn it for people launching violent insurrections, that's where the line is. It's illegal in a real town hall and should be illegal in the virtual one.

A tweet of a screenshot, no link. Sigh.

There was an immediately-flagkilled comment (on a post about free speech, lol) which I agree with and want to reply to:

> Funny, since on HN I keep seeing comments about how the are not neutral and only fight for left-wing causes.

I literally had this argument last week when I said that the only times people advocate "free speech" in practice are when they're advocating the freedom to advocate and enact fascism. Someone was like "but what about the ACLU???"

Fun fact: The Nazis never ended up marching in Skokie, despite the court case. Their goal wasn't to make their views known (their views were known). Their goal was to harass small municipalities with significant Jewish populations, and the ACLU said, "Sure, we'll help."

I still don't think the ACLU is a fascist organization, to be clear, but on the free speech front they've done way more advocacy for fascism (which will crush free speech if permitted to take power) than literally anything else.

But in this case - where it's about a private company, so there isn't even a legal right, and when there's a serious proposal on the table to harm free speech by gutting Section 230 to preserve people's "right" to force a private entity, whether Twitter or a tiny phpBB, to carry their speech - I'm starting to worry.

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