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Comment by 0xADEADBEE | Hacker News Reader

An interesting take on a place where they did their best to accommodate is Slate Star Codex's Culture War thread on Reddit [0]. I've wrestled with this for a while but as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter become ubiquitous, forcing views contrary to internal ones off the platforms is wildly irresponsible. On the other hand, I don't see why I, as a platform, should host content I find objectionable. I do agree it's money-driven but it doesn't work long-term; it's an interesting problem and I hope a phase of maturity comes soon because it's not as if alternative views can just set up their own platforms [1].

[0] - https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...

[1] - https://www.cnet.com/news/gab-is-down-as-godaddy-paypal-pull...

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> On the other hand, I don't see why I, as a platform, should host content I find objectionable.

So you shouldn't have to provide services to people you find objectionable, even if those people are in a protected class? It's a common but mistaken belief that we have no obligations to society or to our fellow citizens.

For hosting specifically, it depends on multiple factors: your ubiquity, the demographics of your audience, the intended/stated purpose, etc. For instance, the Supreme Court recently decided unanimously that social media is the public square, and so no law can restrict access to social media (they were trying to ban sex offenders from social media).

Considering Twitter's and Facebook's stated purposes are to become the place for all online conversation and debate, if they achieve that goal then censoring content arguably violates people's rights. Doubly so because people like Jack Conte have literally stated that access to social media is a human right.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out over time.

In this case, the Supreme Court made it clear that governments cannot prevent people from using social media. However other Supreme Court decisions have it that property owners don't have to allow others to use their property for speech, except in unusual cases like company towns.

It's not obvious to me that they will find these two ideas to be in conflict.

They might not. Then again, aren't Twitter and Facebook essentially company towns in the online world? If they are so ubiquitous that you must join these platforms to participate in modern political debate, that seems pretty darn close to qualifying.

These platforms have became a sort of super states with citizens from all around the world. A single nation's definition of what is acceptable or not is hard to apply to the platform as a whole.

Does it need to be applied to the platform as a whole? I imagine they already target content based on geolocating the IP requesting the content. Even the ad tier status can be geo-specific.

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