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Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

>> Your power utility (even if privately operated) cannot cut you off based on your political opinion, and it shouldn’t be possible for big tech companies to do the same.

> How do you define a "political opinion"?

Do you think your power company should be allowed to cut off service to anyone who believes the things you listed?

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That's not at all related to what I asked (I addressed the topic of political opinions instead of this because I think it's a more interesting discussion) but sure, I'll bite. I think it's comparing apples to oranges. Providing electricity is a basic necessity for life nowadays, on the same level of necessity for most people as water and waste removal. So to say that a power company should cut off access to people saying these things is tantamount to saying these people don't deserve to have basic living necessities. That's a lot different than "Hey, we don't want this text to be displayed on our website."

Many today consider Internet access to be a basic necessity as well... is it ok for service providers to censor opinions they don't like? Because that's happening too.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/isps-should-not-police...

I think you might be dwelling a bit too much on their specific analogy, I don't think their argument should be so easily minimized in scope with things such as "basic utilities don't count" etc., which is also just a subjective opinion as well.

It might not seem like it but you're actually just asking me what my opinion on net neutrality is, which again, is completely unrelated to the topic at hand (Though I am strongly in favor of it FWIW). Again, the fundamental issue is "morally speaking, should these websites be forced to host speech". Comparing them to ISPs, utilities, or whatever other essential services makes no sense because these sites (massive social media platforms to be specific) are not basic necessities for living modern life.

> So to say that a power company should cut off access to people saying these things is tantamount to saying these people don't deserve to have basic living necessities. That's a lot different than "Hey, we don't want this text to be displayed on our website."

What's a basic necessity? Do you think they should have their phone service cut off, because the phone company doesn't want those words being transmitted over their wires? It's worth noting that not too long ago electricity wasn't considered a basic necessity.

I think there's an inflection point where a website's scale morphs it into a utility that needs to be governed by different rules than smaller websites. Where the line exactly is is not clear, but the large social networks are definitely on the "different rules" side of it. And personally, my preference is that social networks and internet services become a lot smaller and more diverse than stay large and be governed by some regulatory framework.

For the sake of this discussion all that really matters is that these sites are not basic necessities. Perhaps one day they will be, in which case I'd agree their moderation policies should be far more strictly regulated. But that's just not the case now.

FWIW these sites are already under-regulated as is and there are legitimate concerns - for example, under certain circumstances if you get banned from a Google based social media platform it can affect your ability to use Gmail... And if your whole life is on that Gmail account, I believe that strays into "basic necessity" territory. But that's not quite the same thing that's being discussed here.

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