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Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

Good thing we aren’t talking about restaurants. Social media companies are common carriers, just another set of telecom utilities that must be regulated so they cannot deny users access once they’re above a certain size. AWS is also just basic infrastructure the public is dependent on in our modern society and should be regulated similarly. All these companies face limited competition due to network effects and market capitalization, and should be regulated for antitrust reasons as well. And in all cases they must be forced to accept customers of all different persuasions. Political viewpoints should also be made a protected class formally.

Also your claims of judging and disallowing speech on a subjective determination of being “antisocial” is exactly the kind of authoritarian kafka-esque censorship that makes the policies of these huge tech platforms incompatible with a free society.

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Why wouldn’t the solution be to build an actual publicly-funded alternative?

> Social media companies are common carriers, just another set of telecom utilities that must be regulated so they cannot deny users access once they’re above a certain size.

In your opinion. There are many good arguments against this and you know it.

> Also your claims of judging and disallowing speech on a subjective determination of being “antisocial” is exactly the kind of authoritarian kafka-esque censorship that makes the policies of these huge tech platforms incompatible with a free society.

This sounds like your arguments are misinformed or perhaps not realizing how things are.

Speech is already heavily regulated by civil agreements throughout American society. I don't have enough time to type all the examples, but here are a few: you can't sell trade secrets from your employer and claim freedom of expression, you can't scream loudly during a theater performance, you can't curse in a restaurant, you can't go sell things 'table-to-table' in a restaurant, you can't make public statements about someone's marital fidelity, or whether or not they have transmissible infections or diseases. There are many other examples.

So there are already pretty strong guards against behaving in antisocial manner and trying to claim that it's 'protected speech'. But I understand that it's very convenient for you to try to say that such guards are 'authoritarian' and 'kafka,esque' instead of presenting even a tiny crumb of valid argument against my very well-argued position.

Exactly.

I'm sure the foot-soldiers of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot had the exact same purity of thought, the exact same infallible self-belief and the exact same certainty they were on the right side of history.

So did a lot of the foot-soldiers of Eisenhower. Or like Euclid and Fermi. This is just not informative.

Not really. Just making the point that believing you're advocating for social good does not mean you are doing social good.

I'm guessing Eisenhower, Euclid and Fermi would have had no problem with people disagreeing with them.

Actually what you’re trying to do by picking those examples is affiliate self-assuredness with evil.

Absolutely not. I'm saying believing you are doing good does not necessarily imply you are doing good.

And I picked some extreme examples from the same side of the political spectrum to illustrate that.

It's interesting that you raise totalitarians like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot in this discussion. What are you trying to imply? Implication isn't a sound argument.

See above.

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