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Comment by legulere | Hacker News Reader

I think your analogy is flawed on several levels. Phones are a medium of direct communication, Facebook, Twitter and reddit are media of publishing, so more like a newspaper or a public stage. They're empowering and supporting people to spread their ideas. But with this you also have the responsibility to not support e.g. neonazis.

This has nothing to do with free speech. Just like when you go to a publisher and they tell you they won't print your book. You can still print the book yourself or somewhere else and this is exactly the same situation with things on facebook, twitter or reddit (on reddit you can even just go to another subreddit with different moderators).

So this is not a free speech issue, but an issue that websites like facebook twitter and reddit have lots of power that they could abuse. They actually don't look like they're abusing it, but are sometimes a bit overcautious in removing stuff that's not supposed to be endorsed.

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But with this you also have the responsibility to not serve lunch to blacks in your whites only lunch counter.

Fixed it for you, at least in putting it in historical context, if you're willing to entertain the concept that Facebook et. al. have reached public accommodation status (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_accommodations), for which as least as strong a case can be made as that they're an old fashioned media publisher, which is a stretch when their customers provide 99% of the content on these sites.

And while it may have nothing to do with "freedom of speech" as those words of art are used in the US, it has everything to do with the more fundamental principle of freedom of expression. You may not see a problem today, but those of us on the right see our access to the public square, the "soap box", being systematically proscribed on these essential platforms, and we will not suffer that forever, one way or another.

The difference is that readers don't go to Random House offices to read. A service like Wordpress or Blogger can be considered a publisher, but FB et all are both publishing and distribution mediums.

I think your analogy is flawed on several levels.

It's not an analogy, it's a comparison between technologies. The underlying principle of unrestricted communication is what is important. If I were to use an analogy, I'd say telling people to use obsolete methods to communicate is like telling a radio station to broadcast in analog to a world with only digital receivers.

removing stuff that's not supposed to be endorsed

This comment, among others you made, is exactly the kind of ideology I find disturbing.

> it's a comparison between technologies.

Totally different technologies. Facebook can be used and was used in this case as a platform to publish things. Telephones can't, they're a one to one communication medium.

If you want to compare facebook with the telephone, you have to compare the part that is providing the same, namely the messenger function of facebook, which is unrestricted in what you can write.

> This comment, among others you made, is exactly the kind of ideology I find disturbing.

It's not even about hindering people to publish their horrible things, it's about not supporting them.

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