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Comment by whythre | Hacker News Reader

This is so naive in the extreme. Who decides the ‘societal good?’ Some centralized moralizing force, that will no doubt be in disagreement with large swathes of the rest of the nation. Thinking that FB is some kind of powerful national threat that must be managed by the government seems absurd.

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Many of the alternatives to "a majority vote decides what's good or bad" are even worse. Lots of ink spilled on the downsides of kings or on anarchy vs some sort of democratic system.

What the poster is proposing about cracking down on large powerful companies isn't even particularly troublesome Constitutionally in the US; but even then, as with any other sort of regulations, Constitutional restrictions on what the legitimate government can and can't do can be taken too far, or can get outdated.

Huh? We already do that for people - we have a court system set up to handle that. If I as an individual keep sending a suicidal person ways to commit suicide, and they do it, I can be charged for that. Yet when Amazon shows young girls suicide materiel (https://www.npr.org/2022/10/09/1127686507/amazon-suicide-tee...), or Instagram is listed as a cause of death for young women (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/molly-russell-suicide-death-cor...), we don't do anything.

Hacker News is one of the most communist leaning forums online, while at the same time strongly supportive of US government policy. How those two go together you'll have to ask somebody else. Any thread you read will have "regulation and government nationalization" as the answer. It's the modern day equivalent of "God will fix it"

HN is one of the most pro-capitalist forums ever. Literally created by venture capitalists to promote capitalism and further capitalists' aims. I visit this site because sometimes Reddit is too much of a progressive echo-chamber.

Since I have you, what do you consider communism?

> Since I have you, what do you consider communism?

To start with, nationalizing mass media and the press.

> Literally created by venture capitalists to promote capitalism and further capitalists' aims.

Capitalism and communism go hand in hand. If you don't believe me, read the communistic manifesto. Marx writes again and again that they need capitalism first before they can introduce communism. The ideologies are not each other's opposite.

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