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Comment by texasbigdata | Hacker News Reader

This is probably the most interesting comment here. Especially (as a moderate to liberal) with the cancelling of Parkor which was deeply troubling.

Is anyone speaking publicly and/or thinking deeply on this future of everyone in the value chain being able to deny freedom of speech? Obviously in some cases it's warranted (violence), but in others where the attack is very pointed (heard instances of cloudfare being petitioned to take down content which is literally internet plumbing) it's relatively concerning.

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26166493 since it's taking the thread on a generic tangent that's been argued to death and back many times recently.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Apologize didn’t see it. Thank you.

The request for a textbook, or similar caliber academic content on the question was serious and not intended to be inflammatory.

Particularly, on something new, the ratio of words spent versus insight is perhaps lower up front as the issue unfolds until learnings crystallize. IMHO.

>Is anyone speaking publicly and/or thinking deeply on this future of everyone in the value chain being able to deny freedom of speech?

Yes. Lots of people, all the time, everywhere. Please let it stop.

Who is Parkor? Tried googling but couldn't find anything about that?

Presumably they meant to write Parler

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parler

I think they meant Parler.

Thanks, that makes more sense. Yeah in that case I agree with Dang, that topic has been argued to death already and mostly going to lead to a flamewar...

>(heard instances of cloudfare being petitioned to take down content which is literally internet plumbing)

It's not, it's a private company. Most internet infrastructure is private companies offering their services under arbitrary terms, because that's the only possible way to have such an infrastructure without government controlling or regulating the internet, which we don't want.

And petitioning is free speech - people have the right to petition anyone about anything. There's nothing to be "relatively concerned" about here, except maybe the lack of competition in the DDoS space, but that's a free market issue, not a free speech issue. If too many people think Cloudflare has stepped out of line, someone will create an alternative, just as alternative right-wing platforms like Gab and Parler were created by people unsatisfied with mainstream social media.

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