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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> For a privately owned website, moderation is not a violation of anyone's freedom of speech

It’s not a violation of the First Amendment. It is a curtailment of someone’s freedom of speech.

> an official's personal account should only be for personal posts. If the government they are officials of wants an official account to post official statements on, they should set up a separate one solely for that purpose

These rulings effectively say that if you taint your personal account with official business, you have to treat it like an official account. That should lead to a best practice as you describe.

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> These rulings effectively say that if you taint your personal account with official business, you have to treat it like an official account.

I didn't gather a rule that simple from the rulings; to me the rule they described looked more like "if you are a government official and you have an account, and anyone sues you for deleting their posts or banning them, courts will have to do a complicated analysis of what you posted that the person suing you was responding to, to see whether it counts as official or not--and oh by the way, Ninth/Sixth Circuit, you are now on the hook to do that".

Also, even if we take the rule as you state it, it still is not what I was describing. What I was describing is: don't taint your personal account with official business in the first place. The government you work for should establish separate official accounts for official business.

> It is a curtailment of someone’s freedom of speech.

The right to a venue and the right to speak are two entirely different things.

> right to a venue and the right to speak are two entirely different things

They’re both components of the freedom of speech.

The origin of our modern tradition of free speech is tied to Parliament, where the right to speak and venue were inextricably intertwined [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Right,_1689 No. 9

You don't have the right to speak from my porch. You don't have the right to speak on my website.

They are not components of the freedom of speech when talking about private property.

> don't have the right to speak from my porch

I agree.

> not components of the freedom of speech when talking about private property

Of course it is. We don’t have an absolute right to freedom of speech. That doesn’t change the fact that we are curtailing one person’s freedom of speech in favour of your property rights.

You never had the freedom. You can't curtail something that never existed.

The Declaration of Right, No. 9, said that members of Parliament have freedom of speech in Parliament--i.e., in the meeting place of the public body they are members of. That is very different from claiming the right to speak in a private venue you don't own.

> very different from claiming the right to speak in a private venue you don't own

Sure, I wasn’t taking it to say that. My point was just that venue has been at the heart of freedom of speech since its modern invention.

The philosophy of freedom of speech applies to both public and private spheres. The First Amendment does not.

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