Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by notl4wy3r 3152 days ago
There are plenty of options in the modern era to promulgate your views without the support of any company. You can host them on ipfs, print them out and paste them as flyers, etc.

Companies do not owe it to you to let you promote your views using their infrastructure. Maybe it is in their best interest, or the best interest of their users, or maybe not. But historically, we have valued companies' (and, transitively, company owners') free speech rights too much to force them to promote views as common carriers. There are of course a few exceptions to this where there is a compelling public interest, but you're going to have an uphill battle to prove that in the case of posting certain types of news to Facebook or Google News.
2 comments
Boothroid 3152 days ago
Not so sure about that - at least in Europe legislators are taking a pretty good look at the concentration of power in the tech giants. I think it's easy to be relaxed about this when the corporations are apparently aligned with your political interests, but would you still be arguing for a light touch if the opposite were true?
link
notl4wy3r 3152 days ago
I would definitely be less comfortable if corporations were generally taking pro-hate or anti-factual stances. But since they're generally taking anti-hate or pro-factual viewpoints, I'm good with it. I think this is one of those cases where it's very hard to separate "my political views" and my epistemic or ethical views. To the extent that the latter two are part of my politics, you could say that they are political views, but I think there is more to it than that.

There are other political views I oppose where I would want corporations to allow those views to be expressed on their platforms. For example, I'm opposed to a lot of economic conservativism. But I don't see it as being anti-epistemic, and I don't think corporations should suppress those viewpoints. Fortunately, that's not what is happening. I would be shocked if anyone had ever been banned from Twitter, Facebook, or Google News for promoting these sorts of views.

So the problem here is that all views are political in a sense, but views are not merely political. It's not rightist political views generally that are being suppressed. It is other, more specific types of views that tend, at this point in time, to be associated with the right.

link
humanrebar 3152 days ago
> There are plenty of options in the modern era to promulgate your views without the support of any company.

Who said anything about support? Do DNSs "support" every website they host? Why would forums be supporting all the speech they host then?

> Companies do not owe it to you to let you promote your views using their infrastructure.

I don't think of it in terms of obligations. I do think supporting free speech and earnest dialogue is a social responsibility. That's why the first amendment was written to start with. The same negatives seen when government curtails speech also apply when corporations do the same thing.

link
notl4wy3r 3152 days ago
> Do DNSs "support" every website they host?

Yes, in the sense we use in the tech industry where we say we "support" a particular use case -- i.e. enable it/allow it to happen.

> I do think supporting free speech and earnest dialogue is a social responsibility.

I don't. Or, rather, I think it exists in a constellation of other social responsibilities, and is subordinate to some others.

link