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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

There was apparently a period of time following the announcement on the Logitech forum where the words "class action lawsuit" were being censored as profanity.

My guess would be the company lawyers told them they were digging themselves into a very deep hole, and that replacing the Harmony Links would be the least damaging / expensive option.

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You could have just read the blog post:

> Q: Are you censoring the words “class action lawsuit” in your Logitech Forum?

> Our intention is to ensure our forums help our customers when they need support. This includes keeping the conversation productive by monitoring the language used and automatically blocking profanity or personal attacks. This is common practice. The words “class action lawsuit” were blocked as our Community Terms of Use do not allow solicitation, including legal solicitation. We have unblocked the terms and are reviewing our list of blocked terms.

Sounds like a pretty thin post-hoc explanation.

I would never discuss or threaten a CLA on a company's forum. That puts the company in a conflict of interest: They are sponsoring the forum that's discussing a lawsuit where they are the defendant.

If you are in the position of being threatened with legal action step one would be to take a long look at your behavior and decide if you are in the wrong legally or morally and decide if you ought to head off such discussion with corrective measures.

Shutting down such discussion isn't going to shut down the discussion on the rest of the internet and is unlikely to help. Its a pretty easy conflict of interest to resolve because your ultimate interest is not looking like an asshole to your potential customers.

Funny my PS3 class action hasn’t paid out yet. I think their PR department told them to do this .

The PS3 was not completely bricked tho..

They probably estimated the number of people who will actually file for the replacement, and found that it would cost less than paying their lawyers to defend in a class action suit that they may or may not win.

The funny thing is, people here and on Reddit bring out the argument "it's only censorship when a government does it! A private company can do whatever they want!" all the time when it's opinions they don't like being removed. But when it affects them, all a sudden it's censorship again.

Have you thought that there’s a variety of users with different opinions that don’t represent a monolithic single opinion? People crying censorship not being the same ones as the one understanding company’s right to control the message on their own platform?

I think you've got that wrong. Pretty much anyone can engage in censorship. It's first amendment violations that can only be committed by the government.

So was Logitech censoring? Yes. Was it a free speech issue? No.

And yet folks stress how much we need to put moderators at Facebook, Twitter etc in charge of determining what is acceptable political speech on their platforms beyond existing legal requirements...

Repeating cycle of "medium gains mass acceptance from open and unmoderated communication, somebody starts to abuse system, people call for moderation."

Most who are calling for moderators are easily offended by things they don't like. If you're that easily offended. You're going to have a bad time.

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