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Comment by Guvante | Hacker News Reader

To be fair saying "there was election fraud" is disinformation at this point, we very carefully checked and the only real problems were people following Trump's advice and voting multiple times for him (on extremely small scales that didn't matter for the overall election so not material)

There is nuance in the laptop story. There were things said that were objectively disinformation so if those things were targeted it could make sense.

Now the White House ideally would have kept and arms length to put forward a "not protecting my own" attitude but there is a wide gap between ideally and illegal coercion.

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The first amendment protect the right of the people to say wrong things, not just right things. The legality of the government suppression doesn't depend on the things being said being right or not.

People who said wrong thing may have committed crimes or subjected themselves to liability for doing so-- freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. But the government doesn't get to go shutting down speech it deems wrong if it did the first amendment would have no force, because inevitably whatever is censored is viewed as "wrong" in some respect by whomever is doing the censoring.

They weren't prevented from saying wrong things or even penalized for lying.

They were deplatformed. You don't have a first amendment right to use platforms as you like and those platforms have the same first amendment right you do to decide what is brought forward as emphasized by that platform.

Should the government be allowed to influence that and in what way is an interesting question but it is less the end users rights and more the platforms rights in question here.

Getting removed from the algorithm isn't censorship.

>They were deplatformed,

which is a penalty for "lying" and prevents them from saying "wrong" things.

in that time What's "wrong" and what's a "lie" could change within a few weeks (do masks help? in march 2020 people were called lunatics for believing so, in October 2020 people were called lunatics for not believing so. or consider the absurd psyop about the accidental lab leak hypothesis)

People weren't deplatformed for saying masks helped.

people spreading the absurd notion that face masks work the same outside hospitals as inside hospitals are causing panic and mask shortages. therefore they needed to be silenced. (that was the state of public discourse in april 2020, maybe you have repressed the memory)

Being deplatformed at the request of the government and being censored look an awful lot alike to me.

Platforms can deplatform you, they're not beholden to the first amendment. The government cannot. The case made here is that it was the government that performed the deplatforming by coersively deputizing the platforms to act on their behalf.

It's uncontroversial that the government cannot lawfully force private parties to do what it cannot lawfully do itself. The controversy here is mostly over if the governments actions were sufficiently coercive here for this to apply.

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