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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

I see. Hold your ground for free speech till... Ok, we were kidding we were just bluffing. Go ahead. We don't care. We support corporate censorship now full throat. It's for the best. We're looking out for your own good.

I mean really, so you know it was in the government's purview to hold Snowden, Manning and Assange accountable to what's within their rights too. Nice to see you sway with the wind there EFF.

Guess Biden can pick up the phone and tell them to let them hang out to dry because you know, the government has the right. Why, why bother contesting them, right?

I was the one thing. The one thing you had as a mission.

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The EFF has held this position for quite some time. They think the existing laws are just fine and oppose the idea that additional regulation would be meaningful in compelling companies to do the right thing. Instead, they worked with other activist organizations to create The Santa Clara Principles. [0]

The chief problem is that enforcement will always be unequal, especially when the majority of people in positions of authority come from one political culture. The EFF thinks it's just fine to deal with this retroactively, but basically, that's saying it's okay to sacrifice a few to save the many. I'm okay with saying that if you're okay with making the consequences for sacrificing those few huge. eg: If Facebook disables someones account because they misunderstood some context because they don't have people working there that can properly frame it, then Facebook owes them substantial damages.

[0] https://santaclaraprinciples.org/

Free speech for a corporation is allowing them to ban whatever they want that's effecting their bottom line.

Hosting and publishing certain speech is a liability.

Why should the state dictate what a corporation must allow on their own servers facilitated by the services they created?

Should the state force YouTube to include videos no advertiser wants to be associated with?

EFF's statement is consistent with protecting digital rights.

>Free speech for a corporation is allowing them to ban whatever they want that's effecting their bottom line.

That's freedom of association.

Conservatives are getting the teeniest taste of being the wrong color in the only grocery store in town that are mysteriously always out of everything, or trying to buy a wedding cake while gay.

Except they're not.

I would love the perfection of that, but all they're getting is the same treatment on-line as if they did the same screaming at the other customers and urinating in the isles in a grocery store.

They are stinking up the place, not merely by existing, but specifically through their deeds, and so it is not merely allowed, but an obligation, to deal with them.

I know more than one decent person who leans conservative in their politics.

I am sorry that you have never met good people of a different political leaning in your life. Hope it gets better for you.

The existence of #notallconservatives has no bearing, including no invalidating bearing, on this point.

Decent #notallconservatives, if they actually were so, could and should have policed their own indecent cousins. If they didn't, then they are complicit.

Any decent #notallconservatives didn't get kicked off of any other platforms in the first place. They lost nothing.

There is no cruel unfair intolerance to cry over here, any more than my comment getting a downvote, which favor you will note I didn't return, as long as we're trying to talk about intolerance. ;)

This isn’t Twitter. We don’t have to communicate with hashtags.

You have made your point. Have a nice rest of the day.

I'm sorry but it's not consistent with protecting digital rights.

This is not the same EFF that supported the Freedom of Speech stance by Apple against the FBI when terrorists killed 16 people in San Bernardino.

Below a poster liked a response by the ACLU which is a much better response to Freedom of Speech than that by the EFF. The EFF caved. They abandoned their one and only mission to promote freedom of speech.

The fact is that a company has the right to moderate their own content because that in and of itself is free speech. There is a difference between the government not allowing you to have a say vs. a company moderating their own platform that they own

> This is not the same EFF that supported the Freedom of Speech stance by Apple against the FBI when terrorists killed 16 people in San Bernardino.

In both cases the EFF sided with the company's ability to practice their free speech instead of the government compelling them to speak or not speak. Seems perfectly consistent.

Aha, so in your heart of hears if Tim was like, yes, FBI, here are 100 engineers, we'll let you into any phone you want!

EFF is HAPPY yes? That's what you're saying? I mean, in this hypothetical this would be what Tim/Apple wants...

EFF seems to dislike corporations and governments working together against people, whether voluntary or compelled. I expect they would dislike Tim Cook handing over info, and would dislike Twitter being compelled to carry speech by government officials.

ACLU counsel’s statement. As someone mentioned elsewhere here on HN, I don’t think it’s the official ACLU statement.

It’s still the weekend. We’ll see.

How so?

Free speech is not just the freedom to say what you want to say. It is also the freedom not to be compelled to say what you don't want to say. That includes the right not to be compelled to let others use you to broadcast messages you disagree with.

Furthermore, freedom of speech does not imply freedom from consequences.

> Free speech is not just the freedom to say what you want to say. It is also the freedom not to be compelled to say what you don't want to say.

This is a powerful idea.

Have you found legal protections in the United States for this principle? I can think of some limited examples (Miranda rights, for example), but I do not, off the top of my head, see the the U.S. Constitution as generally protecting this right broadly.

https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/933/compelled-speec...

This is meaningless.

Of course on the USSR you were free to rattle off “Lenin was a Traitor” in front of the Kremlin, but you had to face the consequences of that.

Sure, the consequences of soft endorsing violence on Twitter are really huge; like being denied from using or just posting on Twitter.

Clearly not comparable to being put in a jail, and losing a job as well as future access to some jobs.

The huh? Are you saying if Twitter was compelling to let Trump on their platform and send messages that’s the same as compelling speech?

But it’s not Twitters speech. It’s Trumps.

The linked article includes links out to other articles that go into more detail.

Wait... so Zuckerberg is totally cool if he goes and censors anything and everything that speaks ill of him or Facebook? Cool if he censors anyone who sues FB or him? Is that your position on a medium that is built for people to post diverse opinions?

What if he suffers a stroke and suddenly becomes a religious nut, cool if he only allows promotion of his religion on his medium and bans all others?

Good god, we’re effed!

Zuckerberg is free to do what he wants on the platform he owns. Just like you're free to do what you want on a platform you own. Or are you saying that if you publish a webpage on your own server promoting your religion I can force you to also post my religion on the same page?

He built a _social_ network with 4 billion users, he didn't build "my blog of religious musings"

So what is the line at which you're not longer able to run a platform you built the way you want? 10 users? 100? 1 million? 1 billion? Or is it just whatever you personally feel qualifies?

> so Zuckerberg is totally cool

That is very nearly the opposite of what I said. Freedom of speech is not the freedom from consequences. It may be perfectly legal for Zuckerberg to do something like that, but it would most certainly not be cool. He'd rightfully be considered an asshole, and his advertising revenue would probably take a large hit as a result of everyone else exercising their own rights of free speech and free association. As well they should.

However, that hypothetical isn't a great analogy for the reality that we're talking about here. It's a decent enough parallel in a strictly legal sense. But let's keep it real: one isn't making nearly as much of an asshole of oneself by refusing to help someone undermine democracy. Nor is one making much of an asshole of oneself by refusing to support the activities of white supremacists.

By leaving "totally cool" undefined, your point is ambiguous. There are legal, moral, and social aspects here. The discussion will be more productive if you will clarify.

They're saying to apply the same rules to everyone, and that the rules should be based on a human rights framework. Those seem like pretty good ideals to me.

Unfortunately this is categorically untrue. Twitter does not ban international terrorists from its ranks nor does it remove regular people who say awful things on Twitter. Go for it, do a search for violent threats on twitter. See if they have banned every account in Africa or the Middle East, or Asia, etc. Even north America.

They may ban Luis CK for misogyny let's say, but they sure as hell would not ban all the Bros who use misogynistic language. Do you think we can't find twitter handles of cartelists making terroristic threats in Mexico or other places? Is that all gone now?

Twitter has a system that misses a lot but they ban regular people all the time. You can pick up a suspension for saying you hope someone steps on a lego.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/all-effd-up-levine

What are you trying to say Biden can do now because of this? It wasn’t clear to me.

But more broadly what is your position here? Are you saying companies and people that run any kind of forum are not allowed to moderate it? They must allow all posts? Or do they have to have approval from the government for their moderation? Or do you want all forums and social media to be nationalized run by the government and we can have a state social media?

Surely I’d think state media and state censorship is worse for everyone than private media and private censorship (which is something we have always had in the US). And surely forcing every website with a commenting system to post everything anyone wants to share is not fair on anyone either. The problem therefore is something other than these bans.

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