Comment by w0de0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by w0de0 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Ok. Let's talk it through.

Government says you're not allowed to ban speech on your property. Tough shit, they say, you're a public forum and no one can avoid using you. Twitter is basically the railroad! But, yes, ok you can ban "hate speech," and presumably illegal speech, like repulsive pornography.

Who decides what the hate speech is? It's not longer the platforms, their owners, or their users. Users can't leave a platform if they dislike the hate speech policy, as every other platform is homogeneously bound by government regulation to allow and disallow the same forms of speech.

The government is now in the business, by virtue of requiring no private censorship, of defining what "acceptable" speech is. What if the political environment becomes even more fraught, and one side makes the argument that the core ideology of the other side is fundamentally 'hate speech?' Worst case, they're elected with enough of a majority to start banning such speech on all private companies' platform (hopefully at this point Americans are using platforms hosted in Europe). Best case, social media is a wasteland, with one side convinced by the norms of the time that the other literally shouldn't be allow to speak - it's hate speech! Which is defined and regulated by the government! Controlled by my party!

To the point of your analogy, speech in the form of sending an HTTP post request to a private website is not the same as traveling on a railroad. The forms of traveling on a railroad while behaving horribly are well defined and easy to regulate. Ditto the carriage of information over wires for the internet - that should be a common carrier. Running a social platform is not the same as carrying unknown packets of information.

When information so carried by a common carrier is composed to make complex political speech on privately-held platforms, which are themselves expensive pieces of property which exist to make a profit, the government should back off. The platform is itself an expression of free speech and free enterprise - it is not common property, and despite the over-puffed impression of Twitter lately, it is not, by any means, the only public forum.

To stretch your analogy, this is more like the government defining what sort of conversations can be allow among the passengers of the railway.

> but, yes, ok you can ban "hate speech," and presumably illegal speech, like repulsive pornography.

Why do you think it's a given that anti-censorship common-carrier regulation would have an exception for "hate speech"? There's no constitutional precedent for that. There are specific categories of speech that the government may restriction --- slander and obscenity, for example --- and so-called "hate speech" isn't on the list. The United States has a very strong protections for free speech, even speech that offends people. Social media can, will, and must be legally required to carry everyone's speech, even when that speech is offensive.

Social media is exactly like a railroad. It's infrastructure marketed to the general public as an important part of participating in society. Unelected and unaccountable individuals in Bay Area meeting rooms do not get to unilaterally decide how the rest of the world may speak.

The first amendment also respects the right to freedom of association. This law is akin to the government forcing you to do business with someone you would rather avoid, for example to make a cake for a gay wedding that goes against your personal religion.

Do you see the breakdown here? The government cannot force private parties to associate with anyone like this, especially a controversial political figure.

You seem to misunderstand the basic sense of the first amendment.

https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1594/freedom-of...

Nonsense, you can’t refuse service to people who are gay or muslim. This political affiliation is being carved out as some exception. This is the antithesis of the non discrimination the US has established itself as culturally. Suddenly the left is coming out with this segregationist/apartide/cancel culture edict. I’m sorry but we had this era of civil rights where we rejected discrimination in businesses.

> This law is akin to the government forcing you to do business with someone you would rather avoid, for example to make a cake for a gay wedding that goes against your personal religion.

But, the government does do that... specifically that ;P. The baker won a single narrow verdict on exactly their facts, but the Supreme Court refused to say anything about anything else and AFAIK most courts are on the "you must not discriminate" side.

Poster mentioned it because it happened and I presume they don’t agree it was constitutional. And because it is an example in which the sort of people hoping regulate social media’s free association prove themselves to be hypocrites rapidly.

Can Christian Mingle require that I assert I am a Christian? Should they be allowed to ban me if I start advocating Satanism?

Because the railroad can't be used to turn my favorite social media into the haven of trolls, fools, and reactionaries. If you accept all speech without any boundaries - ie, with no defined "hate speech," the internet will swiftly become the domain of the loudest haters.

Your arguments apply to Twitter banning Trump - but they also apply to dang banning a poster who trolls everyone.

The one political faction deciding anything the other side says is hate speech has already happened. Okay, so the censored party decided to leave the censoring platforms because they don’t like what they’re doing. Oh wait, the most major alternative social platform is shut down by their hosting provider and the two App Store providers with monopolies and the providers claim it’s a hate speech service. Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc. use their monopolistic market positioning and financial leverage to crush any and all competition and that’s where we are today.

Because the core problem with right wing, anti-censorship sites is they turn into repugnant shitholes the moment they get traction. Because it also turns out that there is a large overlap between people who cry about cancel culture and people who have strong opinions about Jews, the Holocaust, the Nazi party, Democrats, “liberals”, transsexuals, gays and whatever other Republican Party talking point is flavor of the month.

You can spend 5 minutes on those sites to verify the claim that it’s full of hate speech.

To risk dropping my objective ideological stance in this thread, you allude to an important point. Public fora belong to their participants as a society, not as individuals. It is reasonable and required for societies to define taboos and proscribed opinions. It is inherent. That is why speech free from government interference is a powerful idea: it avoids the tendency of societies to perform a sort of regulatory capture and enforce their taboos with ultimate power.

Here on Hacker News there are complex taboos around how we may express our opinions and the type of posting that is deemed detrimental.

While it is important that the government not enforce these taboos, it is neither wrong nor necessarily evil for a society to enforce them through its use of free association - and exclusion.

Boy, isn't that the truth. It's been shocking to see how alternative platforms get the banhammer from their payment network or hosting provider. I agree with the parent that it's hard to define what "hate speech" is. But the "common carrier" ought to apply to hosting providers and payment processors even if it can't be applied to social media sites like FB and Twitter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com