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Comment by hexator | Hacker News Reader

There's quite a bit of difference between the government banning free expression and a private company deciding that they don't want intolerable people on their platform — which itself is an example of their free expression.

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Step 1 - governments privatises /sells all public squares and large streets in your city

Step 2 - private companies that own them hire private security firms

Step 3 - if anyone protests, stands with a banner or says anything in convenient anywhere in the city, they get violently removed.

Step 4 - folks like you yourself defend it under the guide of 'but it's not a government!'

Vioala, no free speech to worry about!

You think this is far fetched? It's happening as we speak, thousands of public spaces across Uk were sold and you can;t protest there anymore.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/mar/05/great-british...

I mean, this is already the case and most people seem ok with it and it seems to be working out. If I go to the mall which is a very public space where people congregate there are limitations that can be put there by the owner of the facility on speech. They can cancel me, deplatform me, ban me, etc.

Just to make clear I'm not advocating for this solution, excessive private ownership of public spaces is a problem that's been known for quite some time and there's a number of laws in place to limit it.

This seems like a false comparison

The only difference I see is that the virtual speech zones were private in the first place, rather than initially public squares and then privatized. I'm not sure if the path we took to get there is that relevant, though.

That logic relies on the fact any single private corporation controls at most a small part of public discourse, so no single platform can impose speech codes on all of society. But modern tech monopolies benefit from network effects and actively collude with and lobby government to crush would-be competitors. So the old rules no longer apply to them

What’s your proposed solution?

- Mandate interoperability to break network effects

- Possibly (more extreme measure, not certain about this one) "common carrier" laws that treat the biggest platforms like public utilities (can't moderate at all). This might make Facebook & co. unviable in their current guises, but would that really be such a bad thing?

Why is corporate censorship more tolerable than government censorship?

Why is censorship by the bourgeoisie more tolerable than censorship by the government bureaucrat?

When corporations control de-facto monopoly platforms by nature of the network effect, they become censors, this shouldn't be a controversial statement.

(not to mention the idea that corporations are people is one of the dumbest legal constructs since the divine right of kings)

> Why is corporate censorship more tolerable than government censorship?

Because that's the free market?

Places like YouTube or whatever being a de facto place for expression only exist because they've been remarkably balanced (as per how the market sees it) in how they handle speech on their platforms. As we've seen with how new social networks pop up so quickly, it doesn't take very long for a company/product to lose market relevance for serious strategic missteps.

I'd buy this argument so much more if the people making it didn't _also_ dislike the free market. That just seems like a short-circuit way of avoiding that they don't want that speech to exist at all, because they believe it's equivalent to violence.

Corporations don't have a monopoly on violence, the article discusses governments killing people.

I think it’s the definition of “intolerable” in the above statement where there’s a problem. Who decides the basis for intolerance? More importantly, who would influence the definition of intolerance for their own ends? How do we coexist when my intolerance is different than your intolerance? What do I do when you decide I’m intolerable?

Exactly. That's a problem.

For example, I'm in favor of banning speech exhorting folks to violence against people of any specific race/religion/ethnicity/orientation/belief. That seems like a simple enough restriction.

But then, in the event of a law like that being passed, the advocates of violence switch their tactic to explaining why said target group is subhuman, or resort to apophasis, or develop coded language.

The solution often proposed is to consider purely verbal instigators of violence to be innocent of any crime, and consider the individuals who physically enact the violence as bearing all responsibility. Unfortunately, having personally witnessed mobs getting worked up and seeing firsthand the collapse of individual thought, I fear this approach is based on an over-generous analysis of the rationality (and individuation) of the human brain.

I don't have any solution to propose.

One issue is that the entrepreneurial class and politicians are not separated, but interconnected.

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