[smcl]

My point is not that "free speech" as a concept is bad (though I do mention in another comment here that it does raise thorny issues). My point is that tying this complaint and "free speech" together is pointless because it directs attention at the wrong thing.

It's the difference between saying "$person got kicked off Google in a violation of their free speech" and "$person got kicked off Google for a totally specious reason that doesn't even violate Google's TOS".

The first one gets immediately shut down because they didn't violate anyone's free speech. If you try to make that argument it's a total non-starter. We can have a big fun discussion about free speech online some time - and that does happen here on HN - but that's not the issue here.

The second one gets at the actual issue - Google have just booted someone even though they didn't apparently violate their TOS. They just arbitrarily did so to appease a paying client.

I hope this is clear.

[jchw]

It's not that I didn't understand the point you were making, I just think it was not really relevant. It would be incorrect to say that they violated the user's first amendment rights. But the comment you responded to says:

> at least pretend that you allow free speech

Which is different than that, and I'd argue most platforms do at least pretend to espouse the ideals of 'free speech' even if that notion has been weaker lately.

> The second one gets at the actual issue - Google have just booted someone even though they didn't apparently violate their TOS. They just arbitrarily did so to appease a paying client.

It is a speech issue, even if not a legal issue, if you can pay Google to shut down random accounts that say things you don't like. The ToS violation is a red herring.

[derefr]

> It is a speech issue, even if not a legal issue, if you can pay Google to shut down random accounts that say things you don't like. The ToS violation is a red herring.

I think we here all presume that interested parties can pay corporations to do anything that is both legal, and which remains within the letter of the contracts (e.g. Terms of Service) that the corporation has entered into; and that the only thing stopping corporations from not being actively malicious/malfeasant (though not illegal) in their interactions with customers/users, is that they don't want to be perceived as breaking the terms of contracts they themselves offer.

Voluntary self-bindings in a contract like a ToS are effectively precommitments about a corporation's own ethical behavior; with negative PR as a punishment for breaking said precommitment. Corporations offer these because they want people to have faith that they won't do certain things, even when interested parties offer to pay them to do those things.

So it's not interesting to me that Grammarly can pay YouTube to terminate creators that were already violating the ToS in some way, but where YouTube previously hadn't much cared. Of course they can. Selective enforcement is an omnipresent fact of how corporate social-network moderation works, because corporations have no legal mandate of 100% enforcement, and costs can be cut by doing as little as it takes to make users not complain. So there are always going to be cases where a corporation didn't notice a violation. And why shouldn't a paying customer (one of their advertisers) be able to prioritize YouTube's attention on a previously un-noticed violation? If YouTube wanted to promise us that they wouldn't do that, they'd put a self-binding to that effect in the ToS. YouTube, like all corporations, is an evil genie that starts off by telling you a bounded list of ways in which it won't screw you. You still have to assume it'll screw you in every way not mentioned in the list.

But it is interesting to me that Grammarly can pay YouTube to terminate creators that weren't already violating the ToS in some way. Because that sets a precedent for the ToS not limiting YouTube's behavior — of YouTube not abiding by the precommitments they have made, of not caring about the negative PR consequences of doing so. Which really means that — to the degree that this is a structural issue rather than a "renegade" actor — there is no reason to believe that YouTube will hold to any of its own precommitments in the future. Like, say, its precommitment to pay content creators.

[maxltv]

Grammarly is not paying for this. Grammarly is not involved or even concerned in any way. This is not even a "hack" but rather trying to use Grammarly for something it was not designed for, and showing it does not work for that. "Ok, duh, and thank you for your interest in Grammarly..."

The plagiarism check is for self-checking, as in users making sure they did not miss any quotations and references in their work, and thus it does not even attempt to defeat any plagiarism enforcement counter-measures. It's not an enforcement tool.

[evilksandr]

We continued our discussion in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29933516#29947146