Comment by kogus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kogus | Hacker News Reader

The surprise to me is that anyone would ever expect companies like X or Facebook to pay more than lip service to the idea of being an open public platform. These are private companies who want to

  1) Attract a lot of eyeballs
  2) Sell ad space in front of those eyeballs

That's all. To bastardize a Lincoln quote[1]:

  My paramount object in this struggle is to make a profit
  and is not either to save or to destroy free speech.
  If I could make a profit without promoting any free speech I would do it,
  and if I could save it by promoting all free speech I would do it;
  and if I could save it by promoting some free speech and forbidding other
  free speech, I would also do that.

My point being, if you want to say something controversial, host it yourself. It's childish to expect businesses to host your content when it attracts the ire of regulators who can threaten their business, or when the content directly threatens their business by causing people to leave.

[1]http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/greeley...

The problem is that all hosting is done by companies trying to make a profit. When you say host it yourself, likely you mean - Build your own website. A few issues with this line of thinking

- Web hosting companies are attacked for hosting controversial speech all the time (AWS stopped hosting Parler when they were put on blast) - The infrastructure required for hosting large controversial websites can also be made unavailable to controversial sites (e.g CloudFlare dropping KiwiFarms citing its 'hateful user base') - Not to mention some platforms/people are literally de-banked, which apparently is a thing, and forced to use crypto for all expenses and revenue

Americans value freedom of speech, these are American companies. At some point our governing body, which exists to shape society according to our collective wishes, needs to step in and hold the hands of these companies and make them behave in accordance with American values. I don't know the numbers but I would imagine it's a very small amount of America that isn't pro free speech.

I disagree with this sentiment:

  At some point our governing body, which exists to shape society
  according to our collective wishes, needs to step in and hold
  the hands of these companies and make them behave in accordance
  with American values

There is a list of things the government should to. "Shape society" is not one of them.

At the end of the day, companies can and will decide what's profitable for them to do. If a hosting service doesn't want to host your site, you should probably speak in some other way. The internet is not the only vehicle for public communication. You and I should be completely free to say whatever we want. Nobody owes me (or you) a platform for speech. Those two statements are not incompatible. As I write this, I'm aware of the irony that I'm doing so on a public online forum. But I acknowledge at the end of the day if Hacker News wants to delete this comment, they have a right to do so.

> There is a list of things the government should to. "Shape society" is not one of them.

All actions of government shape society. Tax break for charitable contributions? Laws permitting or forbidding certain medical procedures? Drawing lines for voting districts?

A completely laissez-faire attitude leads to landlords not renting apartments to people explicitly because of their skin color and blatant, explicit discrimination in hiring.

I don't want to live in that world.

All government action is, by definition, an act of violence-backed force. I think that should be minimized.

I don't share your cynical view that people only behave with kindness because they are forced to at gunpoint. I also try to remember that every war ever conducted in human history was the explicit act of organized government action, ostensibly as an expression of the will of the people.

Anyway this isn't the right thread or forum for this kind of discussion. I hope you are right; my viewpoint is definitely not about to take over the world :)

I don’t really see how your comment is at all relevant to the topic at hand. The accusation is that Facebook used a donation to Harvard to silence a critic, it has absolutely nothing to do with whether that criticism is published on Facebook or not.

I guess you are right; I kind of fly off the handle when I see this kind of topic come up. But the underlying premise of the research in question is that Facebook should be an unbiased, moderated forum for open public discourse. I just don't see how anyone could reasonably expect that to happen.

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