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Comment by humanrebar | Hacker News Reader

> "Freedom of Speech" is not actually a very coherent ideal.

Sure it is. The ideal is that better ideas, not power, are the best response to ideas someone doesn't like. But there are certainly exceptions where power is needed to counter acutely harmful speech like "don't yell fire in a crowded theater" and "don't post stolen passwords".

Governments and corporations just have different interests and different amounts and kinds of power. So we have different norms and rules for what governments and corporations ought to do. But the general principle is the same.

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> The ideal is that better ideas, not power, are the best response to ideas someone doesn't like.

But what does that actually mean in terms of how we structure discourse? "Better ideas" will do nothing if people are never exposed to them, so presumably we would like to structure things so they are.

Obviously we can't just identify the "better" ideas and amplify them, because the point is that people should identify them themselves. But if we don't amplify anything, it's likely people will not be exposed to them at all.

So perhaps we want to amplify things such that people are exposed to lots of different ideas? But everyone's ideas are slightly different, and we can't amplify all of them equally. Should we choose a selection of ideas, and amplify the best examples of them? How do we decide which ideas, and which are the best examples?

Or perhaps you have some other idea? I'm not trying to dismiss all the possibilities here, I'm just pointing out that statements like "better ideas, not power" get treated as simple and obviously correct, but are actually extremely complex when you get into details. And we quickly find that people understand these supposedly guiding principles in very different ways.

It makes sense when you use the term censorship to apply to something like the government, which has a monopoly on violence and can literally jail or kill the people being censored and can apply that standard universally.

It does not make sense to apply it to someone's private property, especially when people are free to continue their speech somewhere else.

Summed up elsewhere, they are not being denied the right to say a certain thing, just the right to say it in a specific place (Reddit or Youtube).

What these people call 'censorship' is more accurately described as 'house rules'.

> It does not make sense to apply it to someone's private property, especially when people are free to continue their speech somewhere else.

The Supreme Court has held that effective bans on rights are also unconstitutional. And I think that's a fair standard to apply in a broader ethical context.

You can say "go somewhere else to share your views", but if the only real places you can speak are in places you own, that's not much of a consolation. "Free speech" implies conversations where everyone can hear. It's not "free speech" to write yourself notes on your own napkin or to scream into your own pillow.

I think its entirely possible to have a public discussion in a privately maintained and owned forum. And the principle of free speech would have us, as much as possible, set up free discussions where the all ideas can be heard so the best ideas can be adopted.

> Summed up elsewhere, they are not being denied the right to say a certain thing, just the right to say it in a specific place (Reddit or Youtube).

YouTube has been running at a loss for over a decade. This has allowed it to become a monopoly and have undue influence on policing speech.

Censorship like this is an abuse of their monopoly privilege. The most appropriate free market solution is for the government to forcibly split YouTube off into a seperate company and let it compete in the marketplace.

In addition we can remove safe harbor provisions and start holding them responsible for the shady other content they don't remove.

The most compelling argument is that Reddit and Youtube cannot pretend to be content agnostic hosts if they are actively censoring. Either they take responsibility for their content or not.

> The ideal is that better ideas, not power, are the best response to ideas someone doesn't like.

Better ideas do not win -- ideas that are proclaimed the most or the loudest win. This is the problem we currently have.

That's a fair point. A very undemocratic one, but it is a cogent reason to not value free speech. Though if that were true, we'd be looking for ways to limit keep especially dumb or naive people from participating in elections. I don't get the sense that anyone, including YouTube and Reddit, is seriously proposing that.

I'm not sure why you took it to that leap.

I value free speech -- everyone is free to share their opinions. But speech isn't distributed evenly. It used to be that only the very wealthy or the very organized could widely distribute their speech. Now it's very wealthy and anyone with far too much time on their hands. This is not a better situation.

People can now wield speech as a weapon -- not by spreading better ideas -- but by simply using so much that it drowns everyone else out. Your own speech online is literally worth less because you're not willing to spend hours every day posting it.

Well, your premise is that people are too ignorant, at least sometimes. You don't blame them for being ignorant, instead you blame bad actors for creating the ignorance, but regardless liberal democracy still rests on the assumption that the populace is qualified enough to make important decisions.

To put it another way, maybe we're overconfident. Maybe the citizens, at least in aggregate, are well enough informed, but they just value things differently. To be more specific to the case at hand, maybe citizens are mature enough to handle tobacco ads on the internet.

Citizen: "Let me see those cigar ads."

Censor: "I can't let you do that. You'll just buy cigars!"

Citizen: "Well, yeah. That's the idea."

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