[LightHugger]

Freedom to listen is a good right and arguably better than freedom of speech but you don't understand how it works. Freedom to listen means the censors don't get in the way. Facebook censoring a post from reaching someone who wants to see isn't "people not wanting to listen", it's facebook getting in the way of two consenting adults who want to communicate to eachother.

Freedom to listen requires freedom of speech, but also requires good blocking and filtering tools on the individual level. If the tools are not on an individual level, and you cannot choose to unblock or unfilter "dangerous" views, you don't have freedom to listen. By the way, we have this on hacker news, this is how the post flagging and dead systems work, you can just choose to see what's being moderated.

[toofy]

what you’re calling “censored”, on my forum (and even here on hackernews) and on countless other forums, we simply say “deleted.” and move on with our day.

from irc to bbs’, from forums to discord rooms, here on hackernews, from our own living rooms to restaurants/bars, if the person running the show finds someone obnoxious, they delete the comments or remove the person. this isn’t new, it isn’t surprising. it’s been happening since the beginning days.

are you looking for publicly owned internet infrastructure or something? if it’s a private space, how can you demand they host people they find obnoxious? how can you demand they ignore that they fought hard for their audience or diners at dinner time.

i get publicly owned spaces, i really do. free speech and all that, but i can’t imagine doing anything but laughing at someone if they ran into a restaurant, stood on the table, yelling “genocide races A, B, C now!!” at the top of their lungs, then screaming “censorship” as the owner removes them.

[curtisblaine]

> how can you demand they ignore that they fought hard for their audience or diners at dinner time.

Demanding that cloud providers and payment processors act as neutral channels doesn't seem that hard to me. The problem is not the bar owner removing the person, the problem is the person being effectively barred from opening their bar.

> if they ran into a restaurant, stood on the table, yelling “genocide races A, B, C now!!”

Well, that's an extreme example. Normally, what happens is that patrons get thrown out for saying things like "we don't want to use your pronouns" or "we don't think your theory of privilege is credible" or "we don't think make athletes should compete in women's sports".

[toofy]

the post i was responding to was specifically talking about facebook and social media sites “censoring” people, in other words, deleting posts and removing users. my post had nothing to do with payment processing. if someone comes to my site, countless other sites since the beginning of the internet, including hackernews, and just like always, if they are obnoxious, they’re banned, it’s not new. it’s not shocking.

and again, no one would think it was weird for a restaurant or bar to remove some weirdo. in fact, we’d think it was pretty hilarious if they were screaming “censorship” while being removed.

> Normally what happens is that patrons get thrown out for saying “we don’t want to use your pronouns” or…

i disagree. you can’t open a major social site and not see someone crying because some random person they’ve never met prefers “they/them.” it isn’t clear to me anyone can claim discussion of this is being “censored” when it is quite literally a massive amount of discussion a certain group of people are obsessed about. it’s trending regularly. censored?

unless by “censored” you mean, “people are using their own free-speech to talk back to me.” if this is waht you mean, we're at a fundamental disagreement on what "censored" means. i only ask because so much of the "they're censoring us! they're canceling us!" crowd, a large chunk (not all) but a large chunk of what they're crying about is just that people talk back to them, and since they're not used to being talked back to, they don't know how to assess whats happening. again, not all instances, but a surprising number of the instances i've seen.

if you want to discuss payment processors and infrastructure, then sure, id probably be on board with at least discussing the idea of nationalizing some of the critical infrastructure. removing privatization of critical infrastructure would certainly remove much of the private company discussions surrounding free-speech, and after some testing in the courts, we would likely end up with some strong neutrality and privacy clauses. for example, payment processing would likely no longer be able to remove payment processing from legal sex workers, which is probably one of the most (if not the most) attacked group of people online by payment companies.

but again, social media sites, forums, or basically any gathering place online, if you expect different behaviors than you get in “the real world”, such as when a restaurant removes a wild nutbag for screaming at their diners, if you expect any gathering place to be different, you’re setting yourself up to be let down. like it or not, online exists in the real world, complex human behaviors still exist there. like it or not, if a gathering place is full of real humans, whether online or offline, this will come with all of complexities and expectations that implies.