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Comment by seneca | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting watching the responses roll in here. What CF is laying out here was essentially the standard viewpoint of western society until something like 10 years ago. "I disagree with what you say, but I'll protect your right to say it" is a basic tenant of liberalism. If you find that shocking, you should examine why that is.

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> western society

No, just America, and even then the famous free speech has always had significant exceptions. Usually by the process of defining stuff as "not speech" or "obscene". Free speech surrounding sex is censored, most recently by FOSTA/SESTA.

The stable consensus also relied on mass media not being a complete free for all. The airwaves are censored by the FCC. There's a limited number of big producers who are vulnerable to political pressure, giving you things like MPAA censorship and the conflict with the RIAA over rap lyrics.

The phenomenon that you can say to a mass audience "this person is a degenerate, wouldn't it be great if someone harmed them" and sit back and wait for it to happen is genuinely different.

(Only the other day I found out about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Film_Corp._v._Industria... , in which for a period of about 20 years the Supreme Court held that films weren't free speech. Going back further you have to explain Comstock laws, and so on.)

Exactly this, for an example, consider Blackstone's ratio[0]:

"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."

This was not some minority view among scholars and has been hugely influential on our (Western) legal systems for a long time (at least two centuries).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio

I don’t understand how this can be true and yet our legal system looks the way that it does now. And It used to be even more unfair.. Maybe it’s true for scholars but not elected officials?

"protect your right to say it" and "help you distribute copies of Mein Kampf" are two different actions.

Except they're not, because they shut down Switter.

When was a platform for doxing and harassment a tenet of liberalism? "Your liberty to swing your fist ends just where my nose begins".

It wasn’t. That it would be dealt with by the courts if it broke the law — that was

So you agree that Cloudflare should be criminally liable for hosting extremist content? (yes, providing CDN service counts as hosting, as the content is stored on Cloudflare's servers)

"Protect your right to say it..." from _the government_. There has never been a reasonable expectation that private businesses are or should be required to allow all speech. Doing so prevents the business from exercising their own first amendment protections.

Nobody is talking about 1A. Freedom of speech is a principle. That there are laws codifying it is incidental.

If I reword my reply to:

"There has never been a reasonable expectation that private businesses are or should be required to allow all speech. Doing so prevents the business from exercising their own freedom of speech protections."

it still holds. Freedom of speech does not mean that a company should be compelled or required to host speech it disagrees with.

You can go much further: freedom of speech also means freedom from compelled speech.

Glad we both agree on the importance of free speech.

Correct, yet for a particular category of companies providing foundation utility-like services, there's a well established tradition of taking a liberal/neutral stance.

Which above all is a pragmatic call.

Stop shifting the goalposts.

This is the law but everyone is free to adhere to the principle of free speech themselves. If you need to be compelled to do it, you simply don't share the idea of free speech, which is regrettable.

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