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Comment by ptdcc | Hacker News Reader

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Free speech is fundamentally about the government restricting your speech, not private platforms. There is no constitutional right to post on Facebook.

Amazing how certain people do their best to ignore this, every single time.

There are laws the restricting speech. There are laws for preventing people from platforms in some cases.

Talk of what's in the constitution doesn't really matter. This person may seem not protected but a different government could go after meta for foreign influence.

It's also a lesson not to trust companies who have a global presence because they are as good as who they do business with.

Nonsensical comment. It's barely even coherent.

Freedom of speech also prevents the government using jawboning or implied threats to bully private companies into doing their will. Government doesn’t always need the cover of law to accomplish something.

True, if the government is leaning on private actors then that's also an issue of free speech, because it's still ultimately at the behest of the government.

> Free speech is fundamentally about the government restricting your speech, not private platforms.

A corporate charter is granted at the BEHEST of the People and the Government.

They are at best an artificial entity, and should be an extension of the laws binding government.

Frankly, the current situation of "You can say whatever you want legally (well, not really), but your job will fire you for it and youll end up in a homeless encampment". Yeah, thats real freedom.

So basically its real freedom for the Musks and Trumps of the world to sieg heil on stage, but fuck the citizenry for their attempt at speaking out.

It's not specific to corporations, it's any sort of private group.

Free speech is the government not punishing you for saying something they don't like, not private actors forced to give you a soapbox.

There were plenty of "specific, articulable reasons" to ban that account for rule violations

There is a valuable discussion about whether those rules should be there. But as long as they are, enforcing them on all platform users is the just thing to do

I figured the speech part was ok until it declined into an active coup but that's just me.

The American right to free speech has never extended to fomenting an armed mob and directing them to commit criminal acts.

When the standing president uses his speech to incite violence at the capital, attempt a coup, spread proven lies about health issues directly harming citizens...

oh, right, free speech. everyones allowed to do anything because they use their VOICE to INCITE harm and that's enough abstraction that others can't see the facade???

bull shit.

“Free speech” has never meant you can say or do anything you want.

Which is true here, except "do anything you want" is "be displeasing to Kuwait".

It's all "they're a private company, they can ban anyone they want" right up until they ban someone who promoters of that idea don't like. Then they're suddenly horrible people for being a private company that bans anyone they want.

if they are doing business in kuwait, theyre gonna be reponsible to kuwaiti law.

> Then they're suddenly horrible people for being a private company that bans anyone they want.

with twitter, people did exactly what is intended - if you dont like it, make your own. now there is truth social and blue sky and threads.

people say twitter is run by horrible people, but nobody is restricting musk's rights to have a vanity project. its a right to speech, not to be liked

> It's all "they're a private company, they can ban anyone they want" right up until they ban someone who promoters of that idea don't like. Then they're suddenly horrible people for being a private company that bans anyone they want.

If they are NOT acting as an impartial aggregator and only censoring/deleting when the law demands, then they should NOT be covered under Section 230.

Thats quite simple.

This is either an "ought to be* statement or it is a deliberate misreading of section 230 and case law. Representatives have proposed enacting this, many times, but platform neutrality is not a requirement under current law.

i dont see why the government needs to be so prescriptive about how companies run?

the current law allows for impartial and biased/focused platforms to exist, so customers can access a variety of platforms and discussion fora.

in your proposal, something like banjo hangout couldnt exist as a platform focused on banjo picking, frailing, and building, because posts debating sailing vs rowing arent allowed

I think your comment, perhaps unintentionally, downplays the seriousness of the January 6th coup attempt.

America has since decided to essentially forget about January 6th but there was a brief period of time where pretty much everyone figured Trump was toast. Impeached, removed, and probably set to be put on trial for serious crimes against the USA. I know the guy has a knack for escaping consequences but it came really close to happening.

He is a convicted felon and that’s despite these multiple criminal inquiries being scrapped due to his 2024 election win.

If he had lost the election, there is a high chance he could have been serving some kind of criminal sentence.

You also can’t wave the “free speech” thing around without understanding what the first amendment is about. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences, it’s freedom from the government controlling speech and the government giving you consequences for your protected speech.

That specifically includes the government not being allowed to police social networks on who they decide to ban or allow on platforms.

Facebook is legally allowed to be a liberals/conservatives-only social media platform if they want to be that. I’m even allowed to discriminate on hiring employees based on their political beliefs, it’s not a protected class.

I was with you for the first part, but corpos have gotten to the scale where they wield power much closer to governments than individuals. In fact I'd say this is precisely why so many large corpos, traditionally thought of as desiring stability, continue to back societal arsonist Trump - they're trying to destroy as much of the United States Government as they can, so they can step into the power vacuum and exert even more governmental power.

The real problem is the Constitutional framing of our rights in a negative manner that does not lend itself to judgements based on equitable weighing of parties' interests. The comment you're responding to tries to lay out refinements to our legal implementation of freedom of speech that at least tries to mitigate some of these problems. Fixing these problems (ie neutering the governmental power of corpos) would be a step in the right direction.

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