Comment by CryptoPunk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CryptoPunk | Hacker News Reader

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>>it might instead be a petty man animated by a misguided notion of free speech that mostly means posting anything you want to a privately owned social network regardless of the potential harm it may cause

It is privately owned, but it acts as a public square. For the same reasons that we defend the right to Free Speech at the public level, we should push the platforms that act as public squares to guarantee Free Speech.

We have already seen how limiting Free Speech, in the name of fighting "disinformation", can be abused.

This is the kind censoring I've personally been subjected to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28411734

Meanwhile on Twitter, the "fact-checkers" are now taking it upon themselves to try to discredit tweets that make the leading personalities of the political left look bad:

https://archive.md/go6EU

This is abuse of the allegedly impartial fact-checking process for clearly ideological ends.

Another demonstration of this is the Facebook "whistleblower". She explained that she was motivated to blow the whistle after one of her friends was, in her words, radicalized, through Facebook. Of course she doesn't consider herself, a lifelong "ally" and supporter of far-left causes, who worked on a search feature allowing Pinterest users to search by skin tone - in order to discriminate in favor of people of certain colors - radicalized. Because that's pro-establishment radicalism.

Yet another would be Twitter's policy of banning people who refer to males who present as women with male gender pronouns. This moderation policy enforces left-wing ideological values, like the idea that gender is a property that is self-chosen, and for something that acts as a public square to push left wing ideology via censorship is deeply inappropriate.

Like Glenn Greenwald said:

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1434854149087182848

>>The entire "anti-disinformation"/"anti-extremism" industry is a gigantic fraud, funded by the same tiny handful of billionaires, governments and NGOs: a scam to control discourse while feigning neutral, non-ideological goals to battle "disinformation"

The fight against disinformation is really a fight to stifle dissent against the establishment and its official ideology, which I prefer to call Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity (DIE).

Parent comment states:

> It is privately owned, but it acts as a public square. For the same reasons that we defend the right to Free Speech at the public level, we should push the platforms that act as public squares to guarantee Free Speech.

I disagree.

Free speech means that no government has the right to tell content publishers - in this instance Twitter - what to and what not to publish, modulo the standard legal exclusions of child abuse material and incitement. (This viewpoint changes if we're discussing a common-carrier or a natural monopoly, where universal service obligations are necessary).

On the Internet, it's the Internet itself which is the public square. The content publishers like Twitter are merely commercial operators of 'printing presses' which make their material available to information consumers/citizens within that public square.

Content publishers should have every right to censor/reject/moderate any content submitted to them. If the content submitter doesn't like this, then they too can spin up their own content publishing platform on the Internet and publish what they desire.

Twitter is not a public square, in the sense of being public property, and therefore I agree that the government has no right to decide how it moderates its platform. But it acts as a public square, in the sense that you need to publish there to meaningfully interact with a significant fraction of the population.

And for that reason, as private citizens, we should use market means, like the one Musk is resorting to, to push for it to respect Free Speech, so that diverse viewpoints have the space to be expressed. If major platforms, that act as public squares, play the role of picking and choosing what content can be published, and if they all coalesce around the same values in deciding what content to permit, then inevitably, the public discourse will be severely constrained, and biased in favor of the dominant narrative. This is dangerous to society because it eliminates the rigorous and unbounded discourse needed to solve the complex problems society faces.

> But it acts as a public square, in the sense that you need to publish there to meaningfully interact with a significant fraction of the population.

I guess this must be a Your-Mileage-May-Vary situation.

I've never used Twitter as anything more than just (rarely) reading it as a micro-blogging web-page, never published anything on it, never interacted with anyone on it and have always encouraged everyone I know to also avoid using it.

Perhaps if you and others did the same, then we wouldn't need to be having this discussion.

We have to work hard to make sure that the Internet and only the Internet remains the public space, and to never give such power to any entities like Twitter - commercial or otherwise.

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