Comment by ev1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ev1 | Hacker News Reader

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Freedom of speech does not apply to private property?

edit: in response to Karunamon, I understand that. But nobody is stopping you from having these discussions on your own platform. Other people do not need to or are obligated to host whatever you want to spew. Nobody is obligated to let you use their platform for free. You can have your speech, copyright infringing content, etc. somewhere on the internet and it will be accessible to the rest of the internet. Forums exist, domain registrars that are not in the US exist.

I don't understand how straight theft of content (for example video game clip stealing and covering in donation links that don't benefit anyone but the SEO spammer) is considered censorship. Nobody wants that crap. It benefits nobody other than spammers and wastes server resources.

> But now, say a word that may make any advertiser unhappy and get deplatformed in an instant (cue: twitch).

Come on, nobody is being banned from twitch for saying Mountain Dew Game Fuel tastes like shit. PogChamp was removed because the dude spouts nonstop conspiracy theories on the validity level of 5G causing HIV. They are being banned for repeatedly and continuously spamming, ban evading and sexually harassing people (re: simp-esque stuff).

> Both twitch and reddit ban as much as possible.

Parler also banned as much as possible anybody that didn't agree with their viewpoints, didn't they?

At the risk of coming off like I'm unloading on you personally (I'm not, but your post serves a point):

I am sick of reading this. Everybody already knows this, at least the "everybody" that posts on HN and I'd wager a good chunk of the rest of the country.

Anyone saying "free speech" is not necessarily referring to the first amendment of the constitution. Can we please, please stop parroting this "well ackchually" correction around as if it contributes in any meaningful way to any discussion? It isn't an interesting observation anymore, if it ever was, and it certainly won't be interesting the next thousand times its made.

Implying conflation of the first amendment with the principle it protects is at best a thought-terminating cliché, at worst intentional bad faith. At least on tech boards. YMMV on Facebook with your relatives.

In response to the edit above, which was a stealth edit instead of a reply for some reason:

Yes, you have repeated the exact same song and dance I complain about here. You have added nothing to the discussion that we haven't already heard hundreds of times here and elsewhere. The discussion is about "should", not "is". We all know what the law "is".

And it is even more infuriating when it is the first amendment of the United States of America that is quoted as a definition for free speech. What free speech means in America is not the same as what free speech means in a European, African or Asian country. Every country defines free speech in their own ways. To always quote the first amendment as if the law applies to everyone in the World is seriously problematic.

USA is not the World. The World is not USA. It is high time we get out of this mentality.

Claiming that the person making an argument has conflated the first amendment with the principle it protects is at best a thought-terminating cliché, at best intentional bad faith.

Had the author of this Ask HN framed his question more honestly, and said something like "Should private companies be able to refuse to publish what I want to say?" they'd get very few responses saying no. But that doesn't serve their narrative, so they framed the question as one about the right to speak at all, rather than the right to be published by a specific private business. If anyone is posting in bad faith its the author of this Ask HN.

The 1st amendment does not apply to private entities. The first amendment is a law restricting only Congress.

'Freedom of speech', however, is not the 1st amendment. It is an ethical precept, not a law. It's like how 'don't cheat on your wife' doesn't mean you get thrown in jail, but you'll generally be seen as a 'bad guy'.

point wasn't whether it's legal or not, point was upholding freedom of speech USED to be a shared goal of all players on internet.

How long ago was that?

> family friendly lobbyists approved programming for your minds

This has not been the case since self-hosting, home pages, tilde-accounts (~username public_html) ended quite a long time ago. No more customisation like in the earlier days - Neopets and MySpace both let you use HTML, CSS, and often helped teach kids them.

For a long time past that era it's been "insert your personal information into these well defined boxes and we will ban you if you enter anything false while selling all your data to as many people as possible". The internet for over a decade now has been built to _consume_, not produce.

Devil's advocate: you agreed to these terms that they can pull anything advertiser unfriendly or deemed abusive by posting your content on a third party privately-owned service; nobody is stopping you from running your own. "Oh we can't scale as much as AWS" is not a good excuse. If the Big Four don't want to touch you there are plenty that will.

I banned people from public IRC channels on EFNet all the time. Google deplatforms SEO spam sites all the time. The internet is unusable without some kind of filter on participation.

Maybe that filter should be moved to the client side, where it can be bypassed or disabled if broken or abused.

This becomes somewhat rapidly infeasible as your client is sorting through a 1:100000 signal to noise ratio.

In a past web forum I did infrastructure for, without sufficient moderation and constant updates to captchas/challenge questions, we would get over 25k signups a day (100 legitimate signups a day), and over 500k spam posts a day (<5k legit). You'd be sending every single client multiple-digit terabytes of literal spam, much of it illegal spam (CC theft dump sales, illegal online pharmacy, are common spam) and making them dig through it.

Imagine viewing a single thread, and downloading about 5GB a page of gzipped viagra ads covered in the entire text content of a Harry Potter book in a desperate attempt to get past some filter, and then having to filter through to get the one or two posts.

It's a hard problem, but I'd argue its one that's been effectively moribund for effort and research around the time of everyone dropping POP3 for their email.

My entire problem with censorship, philosophically, is some unwanted third party making demands on my information input. The goals of moderation need not be at odds with my goal to determine for myself what I wish to read. Categorization and shared filter lists could go a long way here.

> unwanted third party making demands on my information input

It seems like we want the same thing. If we don't have any kind of moderation, then that filtering is pushed out to each and every leaf node, instead of being handled centrally, and this is a huge demand on my attention for information input. Do you remember how bad email spam had gotten before we developed effective server-side spam filtering? Email had become basically unusable.

Email providers still deliver spam, they just deliver it to a spam bucket I can view for myself and decide if the classification is accurate.

The categorization is handled upstream. The decision of what to do with that information is left to me. I think that's the ideal model.

They really don't deliver a huge amount of it; quite a bit (significant amount) is straight up rejected. What you get is the trickle that vaguely passed at least a few tests in the spam box.

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