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Comment by econ4all | Hacker News Reader

Before he was president or even running for office he'd call into a fox news show and say something stupid and other news outlets would pick it up and I remember being annoyed and thinking "why is this news?!" now he's president and everything he says is news and it hurts my soul.

Anyway we live in a free country and the government can't dictate what kind of news a search engine should surface.

It's ironic though that newspapers are actually entertaining this nonsense and not outright debunking the notion and highlighting how dangerous it is.

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We live in such a country now but that could change at any time. If the government starts dictating search results then we will not be a free country. Unfortunately causality doesn't go the other way.

As a republic, governed by the US Constitution, the 1st Amendment is clearly written to prevent such stupidity. I can't believe this is even being entertained on HN.

The first amendment is just a piece of paper unless someone enforces it. When the head of the executive branch of government starts talking openly about violating it, it's (past) time to take the threat seriously.

Especially when the one body empowered to remove him sits idly by and does nothing.

The constitutions of the USSR and Nazi Germany had similar provisions. The constitution of China still does. These things aren’t magic, and authoritarians find ways around them.

When a company has a near-monopoly market position and is using it to harm the public and restrain trade, the government absolutely can dictate a number of things to a business, according to antitrust law.

Before he was president he proclaimed that the unemployment stats are a fraud. Now that he is president the same stats suddenly show a "Trump boom".

I am surprised that anyone is still listening to that guy.

>Anyway we live in a free country and the government can't dictate what kind of news a social media site should surface.

But we're doing this one.

The US government is doing that?

Yes, by failing to act against the block of monopolies that entirely control social media, search, etc.

So long as the government fails to act, they're supporting the monopolies in question. So long as those monopolies exist, what they're doing is called censorship. As monopolies they have the direct sanction of the state.

Bring on the trust-busting.

Why else did we have Zuckerberg waste all of his time talking to those know-nothing congress people?

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