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Comment by TameAntelope | Hacker News Reader

> freedom minded

> tech oligarchs

...here we go.

I really struggle to understand how some folks didn’t realize they were using other people’s things until recently. Maybe the fact that they weren’t physically in a space was hiding the proverbial threshold crossing activity that takes place a dozen or so times as you travel to twitter.com.

It is free speech to kick someone off your platform. Freedom minded individuals seem to think freedom only goes in one direction. I will defend DJTs right to tweet stupid shit all day and every day, just as I’ll defend Twitter’s right to kick him off the platform.

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It also seems to miss the point that you will always use something owned by someone else as long as you exist in a connected world. It's also why the problem exists: being together also means having to deal with conflicting directions and since you don't "own" everything your direction might not "win".

The same goes for getting deplatformed: if you are being nasty the problem isn't the non-governmental org removing you, that's a symptom of nobody wanting to deal with you. (or nobody 'big and easy')

Just because it looked good, or looked like a lot of people were 'with' you, doesn't mean it's true and doesn't mean it keeps looking that way if the barrier to entry gets higher. Hanging around in a browser and 'liking' or otherwise interacting/spreading things isn't actually a replacement for "a group of likeminded people sharing ideals", it's much more comparable to schoolkids forming groups.

At some point we might see a digital platform that is expensive enough and has a higher entry complexity to actually only grow and maintain people that are 'true' to the ideals fostered by that platform. Only then do we have an example that would be 'real' enough to converse about.

Is it freedom of speech to cut off your power supply and running water if I don't like your face? What about mobile connectivity and internet? Can we refuse to sell you groceries?

Can you live without 'using other people's stuff' except like a hermit in a cave?

Power supply and water are utilities. Mobile connectivity and internet are not. Groceries are not.

Someone else's speech isn't a protected class, except for speech due to religion. Discrimination based on things that aren't a property of being in a protected class is legal for any non-utility.

Personally I'd say that internet service providers should be utilities and regulated as such, but currently they aren't so the ISPs are allowed to decide what speech to carry.

Authenticity plays a huge role here. Why do we let shit by the metric ton over the firewall attack free liberties and social discourse online? China literally has payed 3 million + people for years to do this, that's two agents for every social group in the free world.

Most of the bullshit our western democracies have experienced in the last years online should be archived and studied for the crimes our Russian Chinese friends have committed against our free democracy.

I don't like how it's fashionable to point finger at China/Russia for every possible issue.

We literally have registered political parties in the west that do the exact same thing and the matter was proven in a court of law (Leave EU). They have faced no material consequences.

If it’s a government service (like power and water in many cases), that’s why freedom of speech as a right exists - to protect you from government retaliation for speech. For mobile connectivity and internet, similar rules apply if the service is a common carrier which recognizes the fact that while private, these organizations operate as government-allowed monopolies.

For groceries, that’s a private business. If you run into a grocery store and cause a scene or do something the owner doesn’t like the owner can remove you. There are fairly narrow exceptions to this, such as how you can’t usually be discriminated against for being a member of a protected class.

Freedom of Speech in the US was never designed to protect you from other people, it was designed to protect you from the government.

No, the 1A was designed to protect you from the government. "Freedom of speech" is a separate matter entirely.

That’s fair, I should have written that.

I think we both have an understanding that a person should not be left without essential services or be punished without some kind of due process.

If so, the government centric line of argument does not get you anywhere, because there are many essential services are not government owned or controlled monopolies..

My electric, water, internet and mobile suppliers are private Same goes for the bank. There are only a handful of companies in each category in the country, and they could wake up tomorrow and remove me from their network.

You can either have personal liberty, or oligopolies with contracts 'we can remove you at any time for any reason'. Not both.

Depends on where you live and what the law says. I believe some Americans would answer 'yes' to all of those. A transaction between private individuals (or non-governmental organisations) is a privilege, not a right.

In other parts of the world there would be limits and requirements set by the parties elected by the people, i.e. rules on what things you can and can't discriminate on (like ability to pay you can measure, but skin color is not allowed to be a factor for selling electricity). Generally there is a list of factors that you cannot use to allow/deny sale.

You can’t live in a society without using other people’s stuff (practically, I’m sure we could come up with examples of ownership concepts being challenged).

But living in a society means not upsetting people so badly that they won’t sell you groceries. There’s tons of ways to do that while retaining your ability to speak what’s on your mind, you just have to be thoughtful about how your words effect others, even if just to make sure you don’t get kicked out of society.

That argument works if by "upsetting people" we mean actual real people with normal psychology.

But it falls apart when 'people' are multinationals and "upsetting them" means their PR department gets a funny idea. In that case we need a contract that provides more protection than 'we can remove you at any time for any reason'

The whole, “they’re faceless greed machines” works both ways, though, doesn’t it? You’ve got to do something pretty universally terrible to have a blood sucking corporation actually turn down your money...

Not really. When a corp has billions in revenue, your $2000 is nothing compared to any possibility of jeopardizing a fraction of their revenue.

Imagine a corp optimizing click through. Any negative news could dampen that and require immediate action.

You have to be perfect or too big to remove.

And yet I’m neither of those things and I’ve never been kicked off of a platform, so clearly there’s something off with what you’ve said, otherwise people would be getting deplatformed for saying or doing anything at all that might go against popular sentiment.

Parler wasn’t removed from AWS because it was a conservative site, it was removed because it wasn’t willing to handle the legally troubling volume of potentially criminal activity. You can post your thoughts on any conservative idea you want on Twitter, no one is getting banned for that. The only reason anyone has been removed from any popular social media (or AWS) is because they became unwilling to recognize the fact they owe more than nothing to their fellow man, which includes not trying to silence others through intimidation.

Ideas have not been and are not still the problem, is the refusal to think carefully about how to express oneself.

"never been kicked off of a platform, so clearly there’s something off with what you’ve said"

I've never gotten COVID, so clearly there is something wrong with how you breathe!

Do some reading, google employees got banned from gmail and never found out why.

There is an important point that you are missing - I am not claiming that you can't kick people off your platform. I am asking that you have fair due process, and it's the same rules for me and for some loudmouth politician.

Nice strawman argument.

None of those are freedom of speech, because none involve speech acts, or refusal to engage in speech acts.

They are freedom of association, but in some cases—in US law for the first consideration—they are within the scope of such freedom that government can (under the strict scrutiny test) and has chosen to (e.g., either as part of regulation of monopolies or as part of public accommodation law) limit.

In the US, people can refuse to sell you groceries, and for many people that's pretty impactful. Presumably Amazon also bans people for abuse, but life without Amazon sounds like a huge loss of access.

Under the US Constitution, Christians can also refuse to bake gay cakes, fire gay employees, or evict gay members from positions of leadership.

At the heart of cancellation is the freedom of association; perhaps we should redraw the boundaries on where that freedom begins and ends, but while keeping in mind the balance of affairs.

Fair point. But I get my electricity, telephone service, water, gas, groceries for entities owned by someone else and I don't have to worry about having any of these services pulled because of what I posted on twitter yesterday. Imagine the phone company telling you that you will no longer recieve service because of something you said on a call.

Some people's livelyhood depend on their google or facebook accounts every bit as much as they depend on telephone service.

"There is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer"

The argument isn't against individuals, or even corporations, having the freedom to deny service. The argument is about monopolies, or in the case of Parler: colluding monopolies, being able to do so.

There are two things everyone knows are market failures that need to be regulated: monopolies and third party negative externalities. Right and left wing economists alike. Trust bust and regulate monopolies, and return net neutrality.

Rtfa. It says and agrees with the exact straw man you are invoking.

Namely run on your own stuff and not on someone else's platform.

Does Twitter have right to kick someone out for being gay or being Asian or for belonging to some LGBT group?

According to your logic, Twitter can do that.

They can. But won't.

Why allowing (socially as in bad PR) any censorship is bad.

Otherwise you get where we are at. What the mainstream deems bad is silenced. What transient outrage seems bad is silenced. What authorities convince the masses is scary gets silenced. Any voice that platform doesn't like and isnt popular enogh gets silenced.

Would advise using brain rather than simple pattern matching and memorised response. Author didn't mention a violation of freedom of speech.

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