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Comment by beefee | Hacker News Reader

Are there any companies or organizations working to protect Internet freedom?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation kind of works towards that, same as ACLU in some measure. There was also Chilling Effects (I think renamed to Lumen or lumendatabase.org ).

As an international spectator of USA politics, it was worrying how easily corporations took a side and disappeared a couple of applications and banned a group of people.

Imagine if this happened say during Chile's removal of Pinochet or other South American's revolutions where the people tried to overthrow dictatorships. Now think that USA government interests or the interests of any large nation (China, or even Russia) could flex their arms to entice Amazon, Twitter, Facebook and other large companies to block any type of dissident interactions.

The EFF is dedicated to it. You should donate... no matter what your political affiliation.

That want to allow inciting of violence on platforms? Serious question.

Edit to add: anyone going to answer or just downvote and ignore the question?

Let's sweep all the dirt under the rug and then act surprised when we find it's so much grosser than the rest of the floor.

What?!

I think people who want to talk to each other should be able to do it without my listening or interfering, even if they're planning violence against me.

Don't get me wrong, I do want to be defended from violence! But not at all costs. I don't want people to be tortured in the name of defending me, and I don't want every conversation on the internet to be monitored and censored in the name of defending me. That's too much.

They could still do that - just not on platforms who don't want to support people rallying violence against others; it's not smart to build a palace on potential "enemy" territory - or on land of those that may not agree with you - although understandable if they do out of ease, when there's technological convenience to do so.

To highlight the difference: there is a difference between forcing, compelling people to allow incitement of violence on all platforms vs. the government allowing free speech on private platforms that want to allow it; if I don't want you being racist in my house, you're going to find yourself outside of my house; this is akin to private platforms online - you wouldn't want to be forced to have a racist in your home whenever they want to be there, would you?

I think people who want to talk to each other should be able to talk, even if others are against. But currently all "land" on the internet is privately owned, and people who disagree with landowners are told to "buy their own land". That's unjust, you wouldn't advocate that in physical reality. People should simply be free to talk. Either create "public land" on the internet, or force "private land" to allow everyone to talk.

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