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Comment by throwawaylinux | Hacker News Reader

Still looks like spam to me. Arguing minutiae about what exactly spam looks like or the technical details of how it would get filtered is putting the cart before the horse though, and pretty pointless to get bogged into here.

First you agree on the principles, and then you can talk about how they might be implemented and regulated. Do you agree in general that political opinion should not be punished or censored? If not you can just say that, no need to come up with increasingly byzantine ways that it couldn't be made to work.

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I think people should be free to make spaces where they exclude some things as off-topic, flamebait, trolling, etc. eg If I want to run a forum about woodworking then I should be free to remove posts about abortion, guns, CRT, or whatever political hot button issue people might post about.

In principal, I think the 1st amendment protects us from the government censoring speech, not from private parties doing so.

Okay. No need to support your position with flimsy hypotheticals about spam then.

I led with the spam hypothetical because I think it seems (from my perspective) to be inevitable and doesn't depend on us sharing the same (rather American) axioms around free speech.

It's not productive to get bogged down into technical minutiae about how you might and might not cope with examples of spam.

And it's not depending on us sharing those axioms, the point was to establish what the fundamental stance is on the point being debated. Presumably we're commenting on American courts, American laws, affecting Americans and an American corporation, so it seems like a good thing we're using a rather American frame of reference.

>people should be free to make spaces where they exclude some things

They are. The problem is such people want that freedom with none of the liability.

If it still looks like spam to you then we are right back where we started, with people disagreeing about what counts as essential speech to protect and what doesn't.

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