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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

If we wade past all the dramatic language like "tyranny" and "fascism" and "authoritarian intolerance", his main point appears to be:

> On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.

> In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

This take ignores all the other ways "we" are able to speak whatever we want, online and offline. These corporate entities are not required to publish any old thing that their users want them to publish, and those users have other ways to get their messages out, if their message is not OK on those particular corporate platforms. If "we" were actually being "muzzled" the author wouldn't even be able to publish his article and get it onto HN.

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So in your worldview, the only time the author can actually say what he's saying, is a situation where it's already impossible for him to say it at all.

I think you should consider the practical ramifications of the standard you're suggesting, even if you feel like in some abstract way it is correct.

Most tyranny relies on such pedantry, e.g., "you do have freedom of thought, just not the freedom to spread your harmful ideas!", this sentence makes complete sense, but in that example, in what useful sense do you have freedom of thought?

Exactly. In the Huxleyian form of oppression, there’s no need to ban books because almost nobody wants to read them.

I don't really know what you're getting at here. Nobody is stopping anyone from saying things. If I want to say the sky is orange, I can write a post about it on my blog, send it out to my E-mail list, distribute it as a printed newsletter, write a book about it, or walk into town and tell people as I walk by them. Nobody is being muzzled.

What I don't have the right to do is force Platform X, Y, and Z to publish my speech on their platforms. Just like here. If I write something here that goes against HN's guidelines or if they just feel like moderating it away, they have the right to do it. They don't have to keep this post on their site. This is not tyranny.

There's a couple lines of argument to go down here, but to stick with the one I was already on, how many of those need to disappear before you're sufficiently satisfied that somebody is allowed to object to it?

>I don't have the right to do is force Platform X, Y, and Z to publish my speech

Everyone wants their speech to be favored, and everyone wants the speech of their opponents to be disfavored. Wanting these things does not mean you follow the principal of freedom of speech. Following the principal of freedom of speech means you choose not to favor your own speech or disfavor the speech of your opponents when you have ability to do so, and instead relying on the merit of your arguments to win a debate. The US government is generally seen as not favoring or disfavoring anyone's speech because it follows the principle of freedom of speech. The fact that the leading citizens of these United States choose to favor speech they agree with and disfavor speech they oppose on the social media platforms they control means that they themselves in fact do not believe in freedom of speech at all. This should, on its own, call into question the assumption that the government beholden to these leading citizens is in fact such a follower of the principal of freedom of speech as it claims to be.

Freedom of speech is irrevocably tied to how information actually spreads in a society. Inhibiting someone from accessing the superhighways of information is effectively suppressing their speech. In practise, if not in pedantic principle.

If you weren’t allowed to drive on the highway, but everywhere else, would your freedom of movement not be suppressed, to some degree?

If in North Korea they’d allow you to say whatever you want as long as you only shouted it from the top of a mountain when alone, or wrote it on a note and buried it in your backyard, would they have freedom of speech?

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