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Comment by RoyTyrell | Hacker News Reader

Where's your proof of that? Do you think Zuckerberg is a zealous leftist?

Free speech in the form of non-violent speech is not free on the various platforms as they say they are.

This is mostly targeted at users with a larger following...

As as example if you have a diff opinion, or say something then you might get suspended or banned. Even so when others on the platform are more violent, and encouraging violent acts. Look at twitter accounts of Iran, China, and all the accounts for antifa for example. They use twitter to cause and incite violence, yet they remain.

A few come to mind phrases come to mind that may get you banned on FB/Twitter:

    “#Hydroxychloroquine is a safe drug.
    "Eric Ciaramella"

It boils down to this. Left or right is irrelevant, these companies will remove you if you say something they don't want you to say, there's no additional complexity that needs to be analyzed. Any judgement that one needs to make on how to feel about the censoring they do can be made on that simple rule alone. I'm amazed the discussions about censorship have been muddied to this extent where even the past relationships of people have been scrutinized to determine if they were deserving enough of a ban. None of that matters - did you say something they did not want specifically _you_ (the individual) to say at this time? Then they will decide to ban/suspend/remove you. Now how you feel about that is how you feel but there's no reason to even think "Well they let this person say this!", because these companies are not in the business of free speech. They can turn on a dime tomorrow and start banning Antifa members left and right and it still wouldn't change their bottom line.

It's a continuation of what we've seen by big tech over the past several months and years.

You've got Kathy Griffin tweeting photos a decapitated Trump head (https://twitter.com/kathygriffin/status/1323893513226870786) which gets no penalty or ban. This isn't glorifying violence?

Yet, people on the right are being banned daily without explanation for things much less egregious.

EDIT: if you disagree, maybe try having a conversation instead of downvoting.

Kathy Griffin was suspended from Twitter for that, please find a better example.

This is from November 4, 2020 right after the election. She might have been suspended originally in 2017, but wasn't this time and furthermore wasn't banned for repeated breaking of the rules. You can click on the link and still see the tweet.

Imagine if Trump had tweeted a photo of any Democrat's decapitated head, do you think the reaction would have been the same?

Huh, but don't you see the difference, one of the president, the other just a semi-obnoxious C-class celeb...

No, the twitter rules don't make caveats for different positions in society. They are blanket rules that should apply to everyone equally but are not. That's the entire point I'm making.

> No, the twitter rules don't make caveats for different positions in society.

They do, though. (or rather, they did... I honestly have no idea what state their rules are in today, but they've changed some things) It's the only reason Trump was allowed to stay on Twitter as long as he was, and Twitter were transparent about that. [1]

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/world-lea...

Then Kathy Griffin should have been booted faster than Trump, not slower. So the data doesn't fit your explanation.

Responded to wrong comment? (I have no opinion on what you’re talking about)

Trump is in a position in society that Kathy Griffin is not. So Trump could tweet outside the rules and not have them removed, but Kathy Griffin should not be able to. That's what I think you meant when you said

> It's the only reason Trump was allowed to stay on Twitter as long as he was

But here we have the data point of Kathy Griffin's tweet staying up while Trump's tweets are taken down and blocked. So I'm saying that datapoint, that tweet by Kathy Griffin staying up, does not fit your "Twitter lets leaders get away with more" explanation. That tweet from Kathy Griffin should have been removed faster than Trump's tweets, but it's still there.

We can all choose to stop using facebook, instagram, and whatsapp and their power evaporates.

In contrast we cannot choose to stop using the US government. Would you really prefer to have the US government decide what can and cannot be censored?

> Would you really prefer to have the US government decide what can and cannot be censored?

Seems fair- after all it is voted by all citizens, not just by the ones that make more noise. Also, there are the citizens' representatives in the parliament, who openly discuss issues and try to establish widely agreed-upon rules.

Seems completely against the rules. If there's anything the First Amendment applies to, it's the government limiting speech.

Fair as well, but then you have to decide: it's either the democratically elected government that sets the boundaries of the free speech, or it's private monopolies that do the same, without anyone's oversight. For some reason (but most probably just because there is a temporary alignment between them and the choices of those monopolies) most US users of HN seem to be fine with censors of free speech being private, undemocratic entities.

Trump has received many warnings. Kathy Griffin was forced to delete those and she complied and hasn’t erred since.

She re-posted the image in a tweet on 06Jan. Twitter deleted it because it violated their rules.

See wallawe’s link above. That was on Nov 4 and is still live.

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