Hacker News Reader

Comment by bdibs | Hacker News Reader

Monopoly of what though, social media? They don't have any bearing on my life, and I'm sure that's shared with many people here specifically. They aren't murdering people and they aren't stopping the water supply, food supply, or anything essential to anyone. It's Facebook, we all love to hate them, but them saying they don't want to platform a seller of something is hardly equivalent to the government imprisoning someone for speech.

View on HN

Seriously? It's monopoly over the ideas and culture of our society. It's monopoly over the speech that the citizens consume. The culture and ideas that people consume on daily basis obviously affect their actions and ideology.

And yes it is a monopoly. You can tell me that I can go in a town square and spread my ideas if I don't like Facebook, but we all know that means my ideas are effectively unheard, when compared to facebook being able to instantly reach millions of people. You can tell me I can create my own Facebook if I don't like it, which is such an insincere comment, as it's prohibitively expensive to do so, and even if I did, we've decided as a society that it's also fine to then just censor, ban, shut down any system that promotes competing ideas.

But honestly I don't know how you can say with a straight face that facebook/twitter/etc have no bearing on your life. They massively define and shape the society you live in, to a point that has never even remotely existed in all of past human civilziation.

> Seriously? It's monopoly over the ideas and culture of our society. It's monopoly over the speech that the citizens consume.

People don't get information from their friends, television, Twitter, blogs, news websites, email, or radio?

> The culture and ideas that people consume on daily basis obviously affect their actions and ideology.

I agree here, but the only conclusion that can be drawn is "words matter", which is sort of generic and not super relevant.

> we all know that means my ideas are effectively unheard, when compared to facebook being able to instantly reach millions of people

Freedom of speech, not freedom of reach. Also, I am someone who doesn't have a multi-million person audience on FB, and doesn't have the budget to pay for one: am I being censored? Not everyone on FB has that kind of reach - if "being heard by millions of people" is an important criteria, then I am being censored by HN, reddit, and every other comment board where I don't have high status standing / reach.

> People don't get information from their friends, television, Twitter, blogs, news websites, email, or radio?

Friendly reminder that conversations with friends & family come via big tech nowadays, because associating in person is illegal. FB and Twitter are well known for blocking links to mainstream blogs/websites they don't like, even in private conversation!

> Also, I am someone who doesn't have a multi-million person audience on FB, and doesn't have the budget to pay for one: am I being censored? Not everyone on FB has that kind of reach - if "being heard by millions of people" is an important criteria, then I am being censored by HN, reddit, and every other comment board where I don't have high status standing / reach.

Censorship is the freedom for all ideas to have a level playing field. Tilting the scales is the antithesis.

Does a level playing field include distribution to an audience? If not, then I don’t see how the definition would include big tech shutting down an account. If it does include distribution, then it’s so broad a definition as to not be useful (“the tv networks are censoring me because they won’t let me go on and spew hate speech”)

Facebook censorship is partly why division in society is so bad right now. It's pushing slightly-controversial people off to extreme websites.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com