Phew, they better be careful what they ask for. The current regime might find themselves hoisted upon their own petard.
The liberal government of the UK is moving toward complete online censorship with their bill to prevent children from going on social media sites. The reality is that they will now be able to identify and will arrest people for posting opinions they don't like. This has already been happening for the last couple of years and will now be even easier. This is exactly how it works in China.
If Democrats come into power again in the US, this will soon be coming to a computer near you.
This should be the #1 story on HN, but the tech community has been strangely silent on the subject....
I just wish the people claiming to be champions of free speech and rights will just admit that this all goes out the window when it applies to speech and people you don't like. It would make everything much easier.
It's also true, I should acknowledge, that the US has a strong system of checks and balances against stupid proclamations like this and a generally oppositional culture around speech restrictions. It's unlikely I'll be arrested for posting 8647, or indeed for pointing you to other illegal numbers like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag, and if I were I'd wear it as a badge of honor. But just because Americans are successfully fighting it doesn't mean there's no issue.
https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/when-complaining-about...
https://ij.org/press-release/supreme-court-rejects-appeal-of...
https://www.rcfp.org/supreme-court-throws-out-1876-criminal-...
https://www.fire.org/cases/larry-bushart-v-perry-county
There's a lot more.
Douglass Mackey was arrested and convicted for posting satirical Clinton election ads, though this was later overturned after he spent months in prison.
Today's internet has, for the masses, contracted into a limited number of commercial platforms that have strict moderation for brand-protection reasons. Many platforms have outright removed fondly remembered discussion fora (e.g. IMDB, or Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree) just so they don't have to bear the expense of moderating and ensuring no posts threaten their brand image.
I imagine that most people here will deem the decline in highly toxic troll posts a good thing, but any veteran of the old internet will still notice that the range of speech met in daily net surfing is less than it once was.
The current FCC chairman threatens the broadcast license and to block deals of networks who air shows the president doesn’t like. These threats appear to have lead directly to the cancellation of shows — a clear violation of the first amendment, though there have been no consequences so far.
If you really care about this issue, get out of your information bubble.
Whichever party is in power, Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, have tried to suppress speech they don’t like when they get in power. If we pretend this is a partisan issue we can’t stop them.
Additionally, when I fact check what they're whining about, it is often like, "the White House requested Twitter ban medical misinformation about coronavirus, without threat of consequences, and they did."
> I just wish the people claiming to be champions of free speech and rights will just admit that this all goes out the window when it applies to speech and people you don't like
Try using the word "cis-gender" on Twitter and let us know how that goes.