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Comment by maxlybbert | Hacker News Reader

The headline (and perhaps the article; I haven't read it since the headline is so bad) overstates the importance of the ruling.

The case involved someone on his state's sex offender registry. He was also prohibited from accessing social media sites, and got in trouble for posting a complaint about a traffic ticket on Facebook.

The actual ruling is that not allowing him on any social media site for any reason was too broad. Apparently the opinion makes comments about how important internet access is to modern society, which does give a hint about how the court might rule in the future, but a concurring opinion says there's no need to go off into the weeds for that discussion.

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I don't follow your concerns on the headline. How is "a blanket ban on social media sites is unconstitutional" substantially different from "people can't be banned from the internet"?

Perhaps we're reading it differently, but to me, the headline says "you can't be banned from the internet as a whole", not "you can't be banned from a narrowly-tailored subset of the internet".

I think his point was the rule isn't in relation to prisoners who traditionally do not have free access to all of the resources a free person might.

Exactly. Prisoners lose a great many 'rights' when they are incarcerated. Internet access is one of those.

To me the headline says "you can't be banned from any part of the internet for any reason," or, alternatively, "everybody has a right to access the internet." The actual ruling is much narrower: "it's unconstitutional to ban all sex offenders from accessing social media sites." The Court hasn't officially said anything about other people (e.g., current prisoners, people on probation, specific people convicted of computer-related crimes, etc.) or other sites on the internet.

I was responding to the questions "With this supreme court ruling, how prisons in the US are going to allow inmates to have access to the real Internet? I mean you can not ban those inmates from accessing the Internet, right?"

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