Hacker News Reader

Comment by 9864250 | Hacker News Reader

That would not protect free speech, it would infringe on it. Forcing someone to host someone else's speech is both an infringement on their right to free speech and on the free speech rights of users who want a well-moderated community, which you cannot have if the government is overriding moderator discretion. It's also quite dangerous, as the government will likely use that power to promote speech it likes and drown out speech it doesn't like.

I wonder if I will have to use a VPN to access Hacker News from the UK in the future, as this site will surely not let the UK government prevent it from moderating itself.

View on HN

> That would not protect free speech, it would infringe on it.

By American standards (according to my limited understanding of the presumably simplified version I hear from American YouTube lawyer Legal Eagle), but those standards aren't universal.

Is a corporation really supposed to have free speech, or just natural people?

That said, I also expect British legislation related to the internet to be a bag of wishful thinking sprinkled with unicorn dust and marinated in snake oil.

A corporation is made up of people. You cannot take away their free speech without infringing in the free speech of individuals. I have never even visited the US, and I still support free speech. It's not a uniquely American concept.

>A corporation is made up of people. You cannot take away their free speech without infringing in the free speech of individuals.

As an employee there's things I can not say as a private individual, but I can certainly say those things in one guise or another.

Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequence.

In the above example, the consequence is of joining a business that redacts my free speech.

By your choice, yes. That’s not the government restricting your speech.

Imagine a group that gets together to form a company where they all mutually pledge that “anything goes”. What rights to free speech does that resulting company have? What rights to speech does the New York Times company have?

Whatever rights are decided in law.

A company isn't a person, they can have different and discriminatory laws applied to them, rightly or wrongly.

This is sort-of a side-effect of limited liability.

What other rights should you be forced to give up when you join together with others for business or other purposes?

You don't give up any rights. Your company (which is a creature of statute) gets whatever rights the law gives it. Which given its privileged position (perpetual succession, limited liability etc.) are inevitably going to be different from those of actual people.

Which is fine. If you want to exercise your right to free speech you can. You can't necessarily make a company exercise those rights on your behalf because the company (in a fairly profound legal sense) isn't you and has limits by law.

In a post-Citizens United setting, what legal backing exists for your opinion here? And make no mistake, that's what it is... your opinion.

"Congress shall make no law" means just that. Everything else is something somebody with a specific agenda made up.

We're not talking about how things legally are in US (especially considering that this isn't even a story about US!), but about what the proper handling of free speech vis a vis corporations should be.

And it's hard to not come to a conclusion that corporations, being legal creations of the state distinct from a mere assembly of individuals, cannot have any natural rights, since their very existence is a privilege; the society can attach whatever restrictions it wants to corporate charters, so long as they're uniform.

(Note that there's a separate question of what restrictions are actually a good idea. I would actually argue for the free speech side here, but that's beyond the point; the point is that, for corporations, either way, we're talking about granted privileges, not inherent rights.)

Separately, "Congress shall make no law", interpreted most literally, means that e.g. state legislatures can make such laws. The First Amendment was not incorporated against the states until 1925, so this country has only had federal free speech protections for less than a century.

Freedom of speech is the freedom from violent consequence. When the government enforces a law, it does that by using or threatening individuals with violence. It cannot use violence against a corporation without using violence against an individual, for the same reason you cannot burn down a forest without burning down a tree.

Regardless, it's not like you can avoid these laws by not incorporating. An individual who runs a site with user-generated content in a way the government doesn't like would be in even more trouble.

It can "use violence" against a corporation without using it against the individual.

That's exactly WHY corporations have limited liability for the individuals in many cases. That's partly WHY corporations exist.

Do your homework before making ideological mistakes that smarter people have thought of hundreds of years ago.

Your comments sound like the type of nonsense that people use to enforce their views on others; which freedom of speech doesn't grant you, though you wish it would.

No, it's not possible to use violence against a corporation. It doesn't have a body, it can't feel pain, fear, etc. Ultimately, the violence needs to be directed at an individual. The government may (or may not) have declared that the corporation is dissolved before then, but that itself doesn't change anything because the corporation is just an abstraction. The action the government want to stop or compel can only be done by individuals.

It's ironic that you accuse me of wanting to enforce my views on others when that's precisely what you are arguing for, and I'm arguing against.

Corporations own assets, assets can be damaged by acts of violence, QED violence can be directed at corporations.

That's still ultimately targeted at the individuals who control and benefit from those assets. If a married couple own a car together, you can threaten to damage their car to influence their actions. The same is true if those two people own a business together and that business owns the car, and it's still true if instead of 2 people, it's 2000 people. The distinction of it being a corporation doesn't make any practical difference. You would still be trying to influence the actions of individuals in the same way as if the corporation did not exist, and it would still be individuals who are adversely affected.

By that definition, the couple is "doing violence" against me by operating the car, as it damages the environment, which is an asset that I control via democratic means (compare and contrast one-person-one-vote of a democracy to one-share-one-vote of traded companies) and benefit from by living in.

And likewise, you're being so reductive that the same logic also makes the state and the law "just people", as the courts are made of judges and lawyers who are people, likewise the police and the bailiffs are people, the banks may be increasingly automated but they're also still people, and so on.

But then, we have the government by consent, at least to the same degree we have employment by consent; not just by elections, but also e.g. "if you don't like Brexit, move to Germany" as someone said to me, oblivious that I already had — but not everyone has that option in practice even if they do on paper, just as not everyone is in charge of their employment opportunities in practice even if they are on paper.

Of course the state is also just people. All organizations are comprised of individuals. The law is not an organization, so it's not itself people. The law is a statement made by people.

Government is by consent in the sense that you need many people to voluntarily cooperate to run a government. That doesn't mean that the government doesn't impose those people's preferences on others by means of violence. The same applies to gangs and other similar organizations. They are run by consent, but that doesn't mean everyone who interacts with them are doing so consensually. Being able to move out of the gang/state territory doesn't make the interaction consensual.

Governments usually try to maintain a monopoly on violence, so when other organizations use violence to impose its members' preferences, it's usually either in defiance of the government or on behalf of the government. Governments also often use violence on behalf of others. When an employee is (indirectly) forced to work for a corporation, it's almost always enforced by the violence of a government rather than the corporation itself.

You're on to something—this is one of the reasons why trying to color things as ethically-fine or ethically-bad purely based on whether you can find a way to associate them with violence is a dead end. It's violence all the way down when you start looking. Now, it actually can be helpful to analyze things in those terms, but not if it ends at "I found a way that it's violence, so now it's ethically bad, period, end of story". It's as if nuance and context are vital for actually making sense of things. Literally covered in Book I of Plato's Republic, but no shortage of people online using that (very selectively, always, because, as noted, it goes off the rails immediately if you apply it consistently) as the core guiding principle of their political philosophy, such as it is.

>Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequence.

Speech with consequences isn't free speech, by definition.

>Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction.

Consequences are a "retaliation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

Alarmingly, a lot of online dictionaries - at least in English - seem to define the 2,400 year old concept of free speech as the American First amendment. Can anyone who speaks another language see if this misconception has spread to other languages?

By that definition, freedom of speech was always a fiction even in the US — and not just because broadening retaliation enough to say consequences "are" a retaliation is casting a net so wide that it denies causality.

I wonder how many people got away with sincerely saying "Hail Satan, that Jesus bloke was an idiot" in the late 17th (or even 19th) century Bible Belt?

> A corporation is made up of people. You cannot take away their free speech without infringing in the free speech of individuals.

That kind of reduction doesn't work, given that corporations necessarily (and sometimes optionally) impose various limits on the speech of their employees and contractors — NDAs and non-disparagement clauses from them directly; anti-cartel rules, customer data privacy including but not limited to GDPR, and national security letters from legal obligations.

NDAs and non-disparagement clauses are consensual and can be agreed between individuals as well. They have nothing to do with corporations as such. Laws and regulations are ultimately enforced by means of violence against individuals. When the government is sending a national security letter, it's not threatening to lock up the paper the corporation's articles of incorporation are written on, it's threatening to lock up individual human beings who will remain in prison no matter what happens to the corporation afterwards.

All contracts are legal abstractions, as are corporations themselves. “Voluntary” is a bit of a slippery concept in a world where the unemployment rate is deliberately kept above zero to avoid the inflationary consequences of it being exactly zero (see also: every argument about if is sex work consensual or not). Every aspect of corporate nature exists only as an emergent phenomena of the legal environment, likewise the laws and regulations that you accept are ultimately enforced by means of violence.

However, contrary to your claim, that violence can also be directed at assets under the control of a corporation and not just the natural persons. Indeed, in many cases, the whole fundamental point of a corporation is that individuals often should not be held responsible for the corporate actions. So, while fines and penalties for non-compliance can be directed against individuals, this is not the norm, and they are usually directed against the corporation itself; if this exceeds the corporate bank account, then in certain jurisdictions it can become a legal obligation to declare bankruptcy at that point as otherwise it becomes “trading while insolvent” which can result in individuals being banned from sitting on a board of directors for a certain period. The very brief introduction I had to corporate law at university called this “piercing the corporate veil”.

Not really, they're welcome to have in their ToS:

"We will ban accounts for anything we don't like, at our discretion, at any time and for any reason without disclosure".

Job done.

Until some judge decides such a clause is legally void and must be disregarded, since otherwise it would turn the legislation into a dead letter

If we're dealing in the hypothetical then sure.

But forcing businesses to disclose their policy in their ToS will prevent this false narrative of "free speech" used to whitewash a politicised and editorialised approach to business.

Just tell people that your "platform" isn't really a platform, it's a mechanism of control outside the bounds of the law.

> Until some judge decides such a clause is legally void and must be disregarded, since otherwise it would turn the legislation into a dead letter

It's not a judge's job to stop legislation turning into a dead letter if it's incompetently drafted, which this is.

It's to reflect the laws and intersections of them as written.

This bill is going to go down hard in judicial review, because the people writing it and the lobbyists arguing for it are cretins.

> It's not a judge's job to stop legislation turning into a dead letter if it's incompetently drafted, which this is.

That really comes down to whether the judges given the decision want to save it or sink it. Even if the legislation is poorly drafted, if they want to save it, they’ll find a way to read it which saves Parliament’s intentions. If they want to sink it, they can exploit its poor drafting to render it toothless.

I have no idea which path British judges will choose to go down. Unless you can claim some special insight into their thinking, I doubt you really do either.

It's already written in all ToS.

Good. Then we all know where we stand with out digital overlords.

Yeah, but that's how they're acting already. Forcing them to admit it openly might cause people to not use the platform, which in turn might make them adopt and enforce reasonable rules.

I don’t see how it’s an infringement of free speech at all.

A companies TOS form a contract between the user and the company, this law is just requires that companies follow what’s written in a contract they will fully entered into.

To claim that this is an infringement of speech is to claim that there’s no situation where a court can force someone to perform, as required by a contract they entered into. In other words, it’s to say that any court enforcing a civil contract is defacto infringing upon that persons right to free speech. Clearly that’s ridiculous because it would totally undermine the value of any signed contract.

If that was the case, the law would have no real effect, as pretty much every TOS already says that any content can be removed at the site's discretion.

You seem to be under the illusion that this is a well written law, that actually achieves its creators objectives.

All of the evidence so far points in quite the opposite direction.

>free speech rights of users who want a well-moderated community

I can't even wrap my head around this argument. Is the speech of the people who want a moderated community restricted? It may be other things, but it isn't a "free speech" infringement on these people. Free speech is about "speech" first.

A common trope of people unwilling to take responsibility for their own feelings is to blame the world.

If they read something they don't like, it's the fault of the platform. It couldn't possibly be that they should take responsibility for their own offence and close the tab or log out of the service.

Or even, maybe, engage in self reflection to try and deal with their feelings and move on.

One detail where this could come into play is when some bad actors shout down other discussions. Online this can happen when spammers just post hundreds of viagra ads, or when people get doxed for unpopular opinions.

As an aside, free speech absolutists always ignore the inconvenient existence of spam. The absolutist position would definitely support the complete takeover of forums by spam, but I have yet to see an absolutist openly accept that.

"Free speech" is actually the freedom to express ideas. Viagra ads are not really expression.

Of course they are. No less than any other "recommendation".

Sure it is — the idea mainly being expressed is that it is good and you should spend money on it.

Group A wants to say X that Group B doesn't like. Group B sends massive amount of unrelated messages into the Twitterverse using the same hashtags to bury Group A's message. Do you leave it alone and thus allow Group A's freedom of speech be effectively suppressed or intervene and suppress Group B? Either way, somebody's free speech is being violated.

That is the heckle veto isn't it?

Pretty sure I was told that the louder group is the one that is the winner.

https://xkcd.com/1357/

P.S. I hope that the author sincerely regrets making this comic.

That's a purposefully insincere way of reading that comic. All that comic says is that being told "no" and "you're wrong" and people disagreeing with you isn't a violation of your free speech. It's saying that people unwilling to listen to you doesn't mean you aren't allowed to speak.

So you disagree with my parent on the fact that if A's message is being downed out by B's message that is not suppression of freedom of speech?

>Do you leave it alone and thus allow Group A's freedom of speech be effectively suppressed or intervene and suppress Group B? Either way, somebody's free speech is being violated.

Currently China is doing just that, drowning out the protests with a flood of louder voices. https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/28/tech/twitter-china-protests-s...

Is that free speech?

>All that comic says is that being told "no" and "you're wrong" and people disagreeing with you isn't a violation of your free speech.

From the text of the comic: >If you're yelled at(which includes heckling), boycotted, have your show canceled(otherwise known as fired), or get banned from an Internet community, your free speech rights aren't being violated.

Formatting mine.

That is a tad more than just being told 'no' or 'your wrong', isn't it. It is normalizing attacking the other.

I stand by what I said, the comic is bad and I hope that the author feels bad about it.

It depends what is effectively a public square.

Having a community moderated by its members is not the same as a huge corporation (which has control over one of a very limited number of effectual public squares) denying a user the right to express an opinion it simply doesn't like - in the same way that (UK) businesses are not allowed to discriminate (e.g. deny gay cake decorations by a religious cake decorator).

Corporations are legal entities in and of themselves, that exist for specific purposes. They are not people.

> Forcing someone to host someone else's speech...

The solution is easy: stop lying about being a "platform" if you want editorial control.

> ...the free speech rights of users who want a well-moderated community...

Wut? How does free speech infringe on free speech, exactly?

They're conflating "free speech" with "freedom to not read or see things I don't like".

They forgot you can close your browser tab if you don't like something, or stop using a service if the content isn't something you like.

ie, making their problem everyone else's.

> Wut? How does free speech infringe on free speech, exactly?

I think the idea is that you don't really have free speech is some group of people are afraid to speak, which is what you have when it's not well moderated.

It's, I think, the argument in the center of "cancel culture is bad for free speech". Cancel culture don't stop people before they talk, and don't legally condemn anyone, but they force some people to not say what they have on their mind because the consequences will be unpleasant for them. In fact, I would even say that people who are critical against cancel culture but are also arguing that free speech should not be moderated are just hypocritical: cancel culture is what you get (amongst other things) when there is no "moderation".

Freedom of speech isn't freedom from being told en mass to "shut up" and being made to move along somewhere else (or everyone else blocking or moving elsewhere away from you)

Rightly so. Freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach.

Not sure I see what you mean.

First, I did not say "freedom of speech is ...", but "you don't really have freedom of speech if ...". It's a bit like saying "you don't really have freedom of movement if you have a law abolishing the borders but at the same time another law that says that citizen will have their legs amputated". Of course, "freedom of movement" isn't "freedom of having your legs", but the point is that the GOAL of freedom of movement can be, in practice, impaired if you apply some rules that impair it.

The problem here is that "move along somewhere else" is impacted by this law: apparently (not 100% but some sentence in the text seems to say that), this law can say that every "somewhere else" can be forced to accept the mass of "shut up" people. So, there will be nowhere to go where they can speak freely, which, in practice, will force them to just not being able to exercise their freedom of speech right.

I really don't get people who are pro freedom of speech, but at the same time have no much problem will people being coerced, in one way or another, to not speak. Either they are hypocritical (and want to be able to impose their speech without caring about the speech of others), or they've released the substance for the shadows (they are putting values on an empty concept instead of focusing on the goal).

Because though all voices should be spoken, I personally get to decide what I hear and how loud, and get to choose how I respond.

Across an entire population it has a democratic effect when freedom of speech is in full effect without being restricted or controlled by government for means of shaping the outcome.

If I say "Islamic fundamentalism should be the norm" I will fully expect to be boo'd at, shouted down, blocked, shunned and made unwelcome. That tells me my views are not welcome. I can choose to stay, and keep using my voice, but it'll be counter productive.

So i'll make a space where I can say that Islamic fundamentalism should be the norm, and find like minded people. And if I find enough, we might start a party and get votes. Enough people vote and my islamic fundamentalist government runs the country.

Or, people just keep telling me I am an idiot and that's OK too.

I have big issues with forcing (vs being made uncomfortable by other people's free speech) to move on, but someone's right to say something doesn't trump my right to tell them they are wrong.

> If I say "Islamic fundamentalism should be the norm" I will fully expect to be boo'd at, shouted down, blocked, shunned and made unwelcome. That tells me my views are not welcome. I can choose to stay, and keep using my voice, but it'll be counter productive.

100% agree. But it works both ways, and you cannot say that "cancel culture" is a problem: they are just doing that.

> So i'll make a space where I can say that Islamic fundamentalism should be the norm, and find like minded people. And if I find enough, we might start a party and get votes. Enough people vote and my islamic fundamentalist government runs the country.

Uh? That does not make any sense. If they get enough votes to be elected, it means that the majority of the population will not boo them in the first place. And if you argue that by organizing in a small safe place they've found strategies to convince more and more people, you are just saying that it was wrong (for a freedom of speech point of view, I'm personally in support of some moderation) to boo them in the first place: if their opinions are convincing people, when you were booing them, you were doing exactly what the concept of freedom of speech try to avoid: you were working against the freedom of idea and the possibility for new ideas to find their public.

> I have big issues with forcing (vs being made uncomfortable by other people's free speech) to move on, but someone's right to say something doesn't trump my right to tell them they are wrong.

And inversely, right? right?

I think this is the point: "How does free speech infringe on free speech, exactly?" Exactly like that.

More succinctly: Nothing about free speech requires ANYONE to hear you. If you cannot convince people to listen to you, that is not a violation of your speech.

That disengenuiously misrepresents the problem of cancel culture. Cancel culture is the propagation of a vocal minority conspiring to stop certain topics being discussed, i.e. deplatforming. What cancel culture should be is that some shill hawking defunct idea's can't sell enough tickets to a talk to cover costs and therefore stops, or they end up with no followers and no audience, not someone else taking away my ability to hear certain topics.

> ...some group of people are afraid to speak...

What you are describing is called a "hugbox", aka: safe-space. Any platform that actually catered to every neurosis would be totally silent.

> ...cancel culture is what you get (amongst other things) when there is no "moderation".

I wonder how much thought you've actually put into that opinion. Because, for example, Twitter was very aggressively "moderated" and is also the birthplace of what most would characterize as "cancel culture". With such a counterexample I don't know how such a claim could be made with a straight face.

> Any platform that actually catered to every neurosis would be totally silent.

Well, it's a false dilemma: you don't need to have either a law that force all moderation to be identical everywhere or having places that are absolute safe-space. As long as you have some place that guarantee some opinions safe space, where is the problem?

The hypocrisy is that the neurosis of someone is the freedom of speech of another. Bigotry, racism, sexism, ... are arguably as legitimately a neurosis as "woke culture". Yet, anti-cancel-culture people are often promoting solutions where, in practice, we force everywhere to be a safe-space for those anti-woke "neurosis".

> With such a counterexample I don't know how such a claim could be made with a straight face.

You are failing at logic.

"what happens if you don't have a place well moderated" does not imply "if a place moderated exists, it cannot happen".

Twitter was not "well" moderated, because it allowed cancel culture. It was heavily moderated, which does not mean it was well moderated.

In fact, I even think that "well moderated" is rather impossible (you notice the quote-marks around the word moderation in the quote you've used, right?). The best we can have is "diversity of moderation", with several instance that have different moderation rules. Absolute freedom of speech is a concept that just takes water quickly when you think about it with intellectual honesty.

> The solution is easy: stop lying about being a "platform" if you want editorial control.

The "platform" argument is based on a misreading of an American law. Whether or not someone call themselves a platform is completely irrelevant. I don't lose my right to not disseminate your speech just because I may choose to disseminate somebody else's speech.

> Wut? How does free speech infringe on free speech, exactly?

If I want to host a community for a particular purpose, but the government forces me to host the community for another purpose, my right to free speech along with everyone who wanted to participate in my community has been violated.

For example, maybe I wish to host a community for supporters of a particular politician, but the government says I also have to include the much more numerous opponents of that politician, maybe I wish to host a community for a marginalized group of people, but the government says I also have to include those who hate those people, or maybe I just wish to host a community that as many people as possible want to use so that they will look at my ads, but government says I also have to include people who make the community worse for everyone else. Regardless, the government has used force to control speech, and has in effect banned certain kinds of communities. That's not free speech.

> The "platform" argument is based on a misreading of an American law.

... and then you go on at length about the safe harbor provision without specifically mentioning the safe harbor provision because that would undermine your point. It has already been litigated, a platform that caters to a special interest is able to do so - so long as that is what is actually going on. You want to eject anyone making threads about non-car related topics on your car-centric board? Cool, you enjoy platform protection. You want to ban users expressing opinions contrary to whatever your agenda is on the platform you've described as "the free speech wing of the free speech party"? That is a problem.

Which litigation are you referring to exactly? Can you cite some specific US federal case law?

I appreciate the philosophical and legal concerns over compelled speech. If the government forces a private company to host and serve unwanted content then that does infringe on their free speech rights.

However, in US federal law we have carved out a narrow exception for "common carriers". A telephone company can't disconnect your calls just because you're making offensive political statements or spreading medical misinformation. Some politicians and legal scholars such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas have suggested that Congress extend common carrier legislation to also cover social media platforms.

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984440891/justice-clarence-th...

I think the common carrier argument might work if the major platforms just showed you posts from the accounts you follow in reverse chronological order, but when they’re algorithmically promoting and recommending specific posts it’s more akin to readers’ letters in a newspaper, which doesn’t have any common carrier rule, they’re not obliged to print your letter and can be held accountable for the contents of letters they do print.

"forcing someone". If that someone is a corporation it isn't clear they're a someone at all. I miss when people objected to corporate personhood.

> Forcing someone to host someone else's speech is both an infringement on their right to free speech

No one is forcing this. It's kind of like how you can either have a restaurant that serves all races, or not have a restaurant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com