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Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

Making another company host your speech is not.

Making telcos carry your speech is, thanks to common carrier legislation.

I hope we can see the expansion of this legislation soon to cover the modern ways in which people communicate and the modern town square.

Freedom of association - the right to tell someone to get off your lawn, or your website - is free speech too.

Yes, and it's restricted in the case of providers of infrastructure deemed essential to the operation of a civil society. Electricity and landline providers can't decline to serve either the KKK or the Black Panthers.

Twitter, being the de facto modern public square, should soon be covered by this type of legislation.

The only left-wing group i followed on twitter was banned so quickly i thought they posted CP or violence. They did not[0].

[0]https://fr.crimethinc.com/2022/11/25/elon-musk-bans-crimethi...

Lots of pictures of France burning on their site, intriguing.

I guess when it comes down to it I do believe that the platform should be open to all, but there may well be specific times (such as during active and extensive rioting) that strategic delays and slowdowns may need to be inserted to prevent bad actors from using it as a coordinating tool.

I find this regretful, but necessary.

Condemn me. It is of no importance. History will absolve me.

So I guess removing legal content you don't agree with is okay. Which, I mean, it is, but I just want people to understand the 'new Twitter' isn't as high on 'free speech' as they sell themselves. They banned an account just because they disagreed on their politics (and the motivation was a deleted tweet from 2013 apparently).

The ban wasn't regretful nor necessary, and why should I condemn anyone? I understand why Elon don't like anti-corporate discourse and why it bans it from his platform. I have trouble understanding that he apparently rescinded a ban of someone who posted CP, but at least he's coherent.

> When Musk says he’s building Twitter 2.0, he is referencing the transition from the original iteration of the internet—message boards, indymedia, a more or less open and participatory model—to Web 2.0, in which all interactions are shaped by the algorithms of a few tech overlords. They aim to determine what we are able to imagine as well as what we are able to say and do. What has already happened on Facebook and Instagram and is now occurring on Twitter is the inevitable consequence of increasingly widespread dependence on corporate media platforms.

This has happened to Twitter already in 2013 (the "APIpocalypse", which notably, what started Mastodon), why did they keep using it for 9 years after that ?

Twitter is in no way "the de facto modern public square." It isn't infrastructure.

Twitter is very much the de facto modern public square. I wouldn't call it 'infrastructure' but it's definitely a utility, which is probably why a person who specialises in utilities bought it.

Nah. It’s a midsize forum. Reddit is bigger. Mumsnet tier.

I agree. Monopolies muddy the waters though.

large corporations are not people, and do not have rights, no matter what you or the courts say

Large (and small, and in between) corporations are abstractions, through which act actual people, whose rights are not diminished by that fact.

the only thing I concede is that there is a gray area, the in between, as you put it... but aside from that gray area in between, large corporations do not have rights. the end.

I understand that libertarian logic uses gray areas as a means to an end of furthering their ideology, but that is not an issue for me.

I'm not asserting a gray area. People have rights.

Governments, as a condition of granting the privileges asscoiated with the corporate form, could specifically apply limits to its use (and should do so much more than they do, generally), but to the extent they haven't, people who control corporations don’t lose rights merely because they are acting through them.

Corporations don't have rights, because corporations don't actually exist. Corporations are treated as having rights, because they are simply vehicles for actions by natural persons, who have rights.

ugh.... do I really have to spell it out for you. LARGE corporations should not have the same rights as individuals.

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