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Comment by yongjik | Hacker News Reader

In HN, I've been seeing way more comments supporting the "freedom of speech" for those who stormed the Capitol, compared to other sites. (That might tell more about what sites I visit, but whatever.) So far I chalked it up to the strong libertarian bent of an average HN user - some people really believe in absolute freedom of speech. While I don't necessarily agree, I can live with that.

...And then I see multiple comments defending a company's decision to fire someone for one slack comment.

Makes me wonder if people just want their side to win.

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It's perfectly reasonable to believe in freedom of speech in the public forum but a set of rules and decorum at the workplace.

The two should be separate. When people really complain is when someone faces consequences for their public speech at their workplace. But we're still humans and we still care about who we associate with.

A Jewish person should face consequences for being rightfully terrified of what's happening and talking about it with their colleagues?

Yeah no.

As per theverge article, they did nothing when anti-semitic memes and jokes were being posted by their employees.

So what can we take away from this? Github's "professional conduct at workplace" and "diversity" is complete farce.

I'm ready to move to bitbucket after this incident. When you promote people who share hatred, this means the company at the top probably also shares the same vision.

This is a PR disaster for github and there is NO WAY I can support github going forward.

Once again, somebody has flagged every single criticisms of Github's original decision. Is this Github doing damage control? I'm going to move our team completely off github now.

https://ibb.co/fdKKXdH

In my experience, HN is pretty far on the techno-libertarian side, but with a decent amount of pro-social justice thought. It's actually a pretty interesting mix but not without its drawbacks.

This is not a comment on the 6th specifically, and actually I don't think you can apply it to the 6th, but if you are only in favor of speech you agree with, or even just speech you don't actively find abhorrent, you're not pro-free speech. You're not even indifferent, you're actively anti-free speech. Free speech is for speech you hate wish was never spoken. There's a reason the only speech you can be arrested for in the US is speech that directly harms others physically (or has a high likelihood to).

> In HN, I've been seeing way more comments supporting the "freedom of speech" for those who stormed the Capitol

In HN, I've seen people saying that the concept of free speech is outdated and that societies that support it are doomed to failure.

> While I don't necessarily agree [on the importance of freedom of speech]

This doesn't quite reach as far as the example I gave, but it is representative of what at the very least half of of comments in HN are like, when the subject is free speech. I always find it a little ironic.

> That might tell more about what sites I visit, but whatever

Given the difference of experiences, it might just be biases, including selection bias. And yes, I include myself in that statement, though I try to take note of comments beside mine defending freedom of speech, if nothing else just so I don't lose hope.

I haven't seen that much support for '"freedom of speech" for those who stormed the Capitol' - the big conversation here has been around the deplatforming of Parler, which clearly serves a bigger audience than just the rioters/insurrectionists. (Not counting flagged-dead throwaway account comments blaming it all on antifa, of course.)

It doesn’t matter if there’s still some good water in the pool after there’s so much urine in it that it smells like urine and has turned yellow.

People who aren’t of a militaristic, racist, fascist, or seditious bent are still welcome in other fora like Twitter and Facebook.

> People who aren’t of a militaristic, racist, fascist, or seditious bent are still welcome in other fora like Twitter and Facebook.

Problem is that such people are mostly welcome to those sites as long as they belong to the right groups. If you rant about women or left leaning people etc on reddit like women rant about men or left leaning people rant about right leaning people then you'll likely get banned.

So the large group of people who just wants to rant harmlessly but aren't allowed allowed to do it on mainstream sites has nowhere to go now so they seek out sites like Parler where they then get radicalized since the environment is so toxic. It would probably be better if Reddit etc was a bit more tolerant of them, but it is what it is.

Actually, there are still rant on women subs on reddit. And rant on left reddits. And anti masks anti lockdown subs on reddit. They all also exist on Twitter.

The people who want to rant hatmlessly without brigading other subs and without harrasing users of other subs are still there.

Whenever reddit deletes a bunch of subs, HN contains lively free speech debate about how horrible it is they closed the Trump one.

I have yet to see free speech advocates to complain about the left/feminist/communist/whatever one. (I am usually fine with all of them being closed.)

I might not agree what you have to say, but I’ll defend your legal right to say it; consistent with Supreme Court rulings and doctrines.

I won’t defend you creating a discriminative or hostile atmosphere at work, partly because I just don’t want to deal with political topics at work.

I personally think there's a big difference between on-the-job speech vs off-the-job. That may account for some of the disparity you're seeing.

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