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Comment by genericid | Hacker News Reader

Nazis or not: CEOs, who are not legitimated by any democratic election, have no right to decide what other people publish.

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Nobody is arguing that they do. The question is whether CEOs can decide what their own companies host. Since being a Nazi is not a legally protected category they’re free to not help Nazis.

That the CEOs' censorship does not work perfectly does not mean it does not exist.

> Since being a Nazi is not a legally protected category they’re free to not help Nazis.

What currently is legal is obviously irrelevant when the question is what should be legal.

Again, this is not a hard problem once you shake the poor framing you’re stuck in. It’s not a question of legality because this isn’t the government preventing them from speaking and it doesn’t involve a legally protected class. It’s also not a question of some CEO preventing someone else from speaking. The only thing going on is a CEO saying they won’t help promote that speech, which is a basic right.

Of course it is a question of legality. It is a question of whether a CEO -- who has no democratic legitimacy -- should be allowed to decide what can be (in a manner that other people will actually read) published. And as I said, that their censorship is not perfect does not make a difference.

> and it doesn’t involve a legally protected class.

All your saying is that the CEOs' censorship is legal because it's legal.

Again, no CEO is preventing people from publishing things. You can setup your own server and publish anything you want unless it’s in a few illegal categories. Your position seems to be that your desire not to pay for hosting confers some sort of right to compel other people to pay for it but that’s simply not true.

I'm not going to continue a discussion with someone that seems to guess instead of read what I write.

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