Hacker News Reader

Comment by thinkingtoilet | Hacker News Reader

How is this an attack on free speech? What individual is getting punished for their speech by the government? There is hardly a lack of spaces online for you to say just about anything.

View on HN

Free speech includes the right to receive/hear speech. TikTok contains a trove of speech that doesn't exist elsewhere. Banning it is unconstitutional, and I'm confident the courts will agree.

Google and Meta have limited what political content they'll show to you, feels like a pretty clear attack on something the establishment doesn't like but justifying it with the boogey man of communism: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/26/1240737627/meta-limit-politic...

Your response has absolutely nothing to do with the first amendment. If a private company wants to limit discussion on their platform they can. Facebook is not a right. If it's limiting the speech you don't like, leave.

The most overused argument. I wonder if you’d feel the same way if every bank decided to ban you. Or every grocery store.

If you go into a grocery store or a bank and harrass people or behave badly, you will get banned. Try getting a bank account if you have a felony for bank robbery.

There was a guy who received a lifetime ban from Safeway for driving through their garden displays and breaking windows in their stores.

The US does ban people from using banks. See also: list of specially designated nationals, etc.

I’ll happily agree it’s not a first amendment issue, but I think it’s a problem. A systemic analysis here reveals that, in effect, the discourse is clamped down on and censored in a way not to dissimilar in its consequences from actual government censorship. The vast majority of the population engages in discourse in spaces where some topics are made off limits, meaning they won’t be exposed to them. I do think we should be concerned about that when it has tangible negative effects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com