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Comment by alexfromapex | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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