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Comment by zmgsabst | Hacker News Reader

Governments which claim to support values like freedom of speech, but in fact do not.

Eg, the US — who is outspoken on that issue, but during an emergency used social media companies to censor doctors, politicians, etc who did not agree with them.

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They passed laws making those social media companies censor them?

They didn’t have to.

They had officials coordinate with social media companies to coordinate takedowns of accounts and messages which disagreed with them.

So, public health officials asked social media companies to stop accounts from spamming that vaccines cause autism?

There was no law and no threat, just public and private coordination.

I have no problem with that. Sorry, this is not even close to censorship.

If a member of the government asks their friend in a social media company to quietly take down a post, they are using influence and corruption (of the company) to impose government censorship. If they ask the legal representatives of the company to make a policy decision to take down a post, there is the implied threat of regulation, and it is government coersion. Both are legally violations of the first amendment.

I think it's bad public policy for government to coerce social media companies into censoring information, however it's not clear whether that legally amounts to a First Amendment violation. There are no clear legal precedents in that area. It will be interesting to see how the courts rule on the Missouri v. Biden case.

https://ago.mo.gov/home/news/2022/05/05/missouri-louisiana-a...

You have freedom to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theatre.

Just as you have freedom to pay for the consequences of that.

Bad example

Exactly! Good example!

That metaphor was originally used to justify criminalizing protesting wars.

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