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Comment by ambrozk | Hacker News Reader

If there is a pulpit in the town square, then the 1st amendment says that a speaker *is* entitled to that pulpit. This is the essence of free speech, and always has been. The 1st amendment is very explicit about this: citizens have a right to assemble *in public* and air their opinions *publicly.* Cordoning off opinions and declaring them unfit for certain public squares is a classic form of censorship. Communists, Republicans, the KKK, NAMBLA, the NRA, GLAAD, Gay Geeks for Bernie and the ASPCA all have the right to march on the National Mall.

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Exactly. IMHO, we just need to accept that "public" has extended and changed to encompass publicly-accessible, privately-owned platforms of a sufficient size.

That would violate the property and First Amendment rights of the private platform owners.

You could, however, advocate for the creation of a publicly-owned Internet platform where all speech would be acceptable. Why don't you do that, instead?

> "That would violate the property and First Amendment rights of the private platform owners.

Much like the Fair Housing Act of 1968 restricts the Constitutional property rights of earlier bigots who didn't want to sell property to the "wrong" type of people, society by and large will likely be okay with violating the Constitutional property rights of the illiberal who don't want to allow the "wrong" type of people to use market-dominant services.

Illiberalism is illiberalism, regardless of whether it comes from the right of the left.

This comes across as a thinly-veiled opinion that property owners should be allowed not to sell to a buyer solely because they are Black. That's what you mean, right? You might as well say it straightforwardly instead of attempting to hide behind a veil of logical equivalence.

...What? The comment you're replying to is pretty explicitly arguing the exact opposite of what you claim it is.

"People will be ok with this restriction because it's similar to this earlier clearly correct restriction."

...what?

The second paragraph is saying that the practices that the FHA banned were also illiberalism, just like the current practices of the current service providers.

And there is no charitable interpretation or benefit of the doubt needed; it's crystal clear. In order to even have the option of reading it the way you keep trying to, I'd have to ignore: referring to the landlords who had their bad behavior banned as "bigots"; putting scare quotes around both cases of "wrong"; explicitly calling the current platform providers illiberal.

I apologize to the author; upon reflection, I think your interpretation is correct.

First, this comparison is inapt. We forbid people from discriminating against who can buy housing because a person’s race is something that is part of their identity, they are born with, that they didn’t choose, and has no bearing whatsoever on whether they can afford or deserve to own property. Restrictions in social media, on the other hand, pertain to voluntary behavior that the subject is 100% in control of and should be responsible for.

Second, you can't easily separate the property-rights issue from the free-speech issue; they are naturally intertwined. In this case, that property (equipment, software, etc.) is being used specifically to broadcast speech, and we don't force people to repeat the speech of others (using mechanical devices or otherwise).

Finally, fairness as a platform concept was once a thing imposed by the FCC up till the 1980s (due to the scarcity of broadcast channels) and is now dead. We've replaced that with the possibility of infinite numbers of outlets. There's nothing stopping someone from building an anything-goes Twitter. And in fact, people have tried, as recently as two years ago (remember Parler?), but they end up dying from their own radioactive contamination.

I've seen the first argument made before and IMO it's not a workable refutation because it ignores those protected classes for characteristics one is not born with intrinsically, namely religion/creed, which can change, e.g. people leaving cults, conversions between faiths, and those who become agnostic/atheist, and gender identity, given proponents of that concept believe it to be fluid (as best I understand it). Unless you are denying those classes should be protected classes, then there is significant precedent for protecting changeable aspects of one's identity.

Regarding the second point, actually we do (or did; the Trump administration rolled it back and the Biden administration is trying to re-instate it) "force people to repeat the speech of others"; one of the points of the FCC's net neutrality definition was "No blocking: This includes a right to send and receive lawful traffic, prohibits the blocking of lawful content, apps, services and the connection of non-harmful devices to the network" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S...) and even deplorable speech is still lawful.

Regarding the third point, lots of online services died before the dominant incumbents of today came to power, e.g. AltaVista, Lycos, etc. Various conservative media outlets, like Fox News, are still around and thriving; you can bet they are watching and learning from these failures. Whose to say that one of them doesn't dislodge the incumbents and it becomes your viewpoint that needs protection? Public opinion is fickle.

(As an aside, sorry if my original post was confusing; I need to get better at writing.)

People’s political beliefs are not, and should not be, protected classes.

And yet religious beliefs, generally speaking, are protected.

How hard does someone have to believe something before it crosses the line into religion? Or is it just a matter of paperwork?

> If there is a pulpit in the town square, then the 1st amendment says that a speaker is entitled to that pulpit.

Okay but what about when I want to use the pulpit? By your logic, if you're using the pulpit you are restricting my speech, because I can't exercise my speech while you're exercising yours. And by that token, if everyone in the town square wanted to shout you down and drown you out while you were at the pulpit, you can't really complain on the basis of free speech, right? Because any restrictions on their shouting would encroach on their free speech rights.

Apparently this is what we call "cancel culture", and the reason we're still talking about it today is that people complaining about it have no coherent ideas on how to fix it without also trampling all over the very free speech principles they are decrying have been violated.

This knot people have tied themselves into is fascinating.

No, you're imagining complications that don't exist. The very boring answer is that if two people (or groups) want to exercise their right to free speech at the same time, the government is charged with fairly apportioning the space to each of them in turn, in such a manner that both will ultimately be able to express themselves. If one of the parties feels the government is unfairly restricting their right to speech, they can take the government to court, and the court will adjudicate the dispute.

What people are describing as "cancel culture" is a totally different phenomenon.

> the government is charged with fairly apportioning the space to each of them in turn, in such a manner that both will ultimately be able to express themselves.

But even if you have the space according to whatever schedule is set up, I and all my friends can still go to the square while you are talking, and we can open our mouths to scream at the top of our lungs for as long as we like. Right? That's unrestricted free speech, is it not? For the government to come along and tell me to close my mouth, that would abridge my free speech rights.

> What people are describing as "cancel culture" is a totally different phenomenon.

I'm not sure. I've seen the term applied to almost any kind of restriction of speech, no matter how benign or justified. It's so broad as to be meaningless at this point.

I've never seen a pulpit or a town square in the city I live in. Have you?

Yes, though "town square" is a metaphor which typically refers to public space generally, and usually includes things like streetcorners in its definition.

Ah, then have you seen someone denied from accessing this town square?

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