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Comment by hacknat | Hacker News Reader

What does free speech have to do with this? Cloudflare and other companies have 1st amendment rights as well. One of them is that they can serve customers as they like, as long as they are not violating the rights of a protected class. Political ideology or party affiliation is not a protected class, nor should it be. Twitter could ban every Republican on its platform tomorrow and it if the government tried to stop them the Supreme Court would likely side with Twitter.

Companies are allowed to discriminate against political ideology as much as they like. It’s their 1st amendment right to do so. So 1st amendment advocates should be on the side of company censorship, not the other way around.

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Imagine an alternate scenario.

Say the major tech companies get fed up with Elizabeth Warren's calls to regulate them.

Facebook removes all her groups. Cloudflare shuts down her websites. Youtube removes her videos. Google only leaves anti-Elizabeth Warren search results up, etc. Basically a major presidential candidate is completely locked out of having any presence on the Internet whatsoever.

Would your reaction be the same? "This has nothing to do with free speech. These are merely private companies deciding they don't want to associate with Elizabeth Warren."

No one is entitled to a youtube channel, that I am aware of. Would it be bad publicity? Maybe but, I'm sure plenty of people would cheer the ban.

I've never needed Facebook, Google or Cloudflare to have an internet presence, but maybe I don't know what the internet is.

I assure you that a politician today in the US needs a social media presence. As much as he/she would need a news presence.

Many people on both side make a point of how memes were essential in Trump's win.

This is false equivalence. Imagine if I could support a company when they help take down websites breeding hate speech and terrorists - and not support that same company if they interfered with an election.

No, they aren't equating mass shooting and political candidates. They are responding to the assertion that political ideology isn't a protected class.

If you want to defend the 1st amendment rights of companies to choose their customers, you must apply that across the board, or suggest the laws be changed.

If companies can exercise their 1st amendment rights to shut down political ideology in this instance (and if you think that's fine), then to be consistent you need to defend it elsewhere. Shutting down political opponents, choosing which political ads to run, choosing which investigations to allow in search results, etc. And censoring Elizabeth Warren is a perfectly valid example of how companies could exercise their rights, if indeed you think those rights should exist.

I understand the point they're making, but I'm not putting forth the argument they're arguing against. I think companies should be banned from most forms of political speech because their goals are by nature typically harmful to their workers and often the public at large.

However, even if the laws were changed to do so, I don't think that this should count as 'political speech'. Terrorism and hate should not be considered valid or protected political ideologies.

I think market retribution would take care of their decision pretty handily. I also think the same is true for Republicans. Twitter could never survive the market retaliation if they banned the Republican Party, but they have every legal right to do so.

Also, changing the players in my scenario has nothing to do with anything, mine isn’t an opinion it is a matter of rule of law. If you don’t share that assumption with me than I have to fall silent.

Market retribution would take time, and I'm not sure the impact on market usage would be as big as you suggest. Certainly the market retribution on Facebook invading privacy has been slow a minimal.

And that aside, Warren would certainly lose the election if that happened. The election would be materially interfered with, regardless of whether the market responded to the moderation or not.

>Market retribution...

Good Joke

I mentioned this above. The relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/1357/

I've pointed this out many times, but Randal conflates freedom of speech with the first amendment of the US Constitution (and other similar protections against government interference) with freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech goes way beyond freedom from government censorship... And it isn't some mystical unlimited right that trumps all other rights.

> One of them is that they can serve customers as they like, as long as they are not violating the rights of a protected class. Political ideology or party affiliation is not a protected class, nor should it be. Twitter could ban every Republican on its platform tomorrow and it if the government tried to stop them the Supreme Court would likely side with Twitter.

Where's the line between "political ideology" and "religion"? Is it your assertion that "kill all the jews because we're nazis and our leaders say jews are evil" is something that you should be able to ban while "kill all the jews because islam says jews are evil" is protected?

Since religion is almost always a protected class.

"kill all the jews because islam says jews are evil"

is not protected speech by any stretch of the imagination

What about "jews should all be killed because Islam says jews are evil"? How is that different (I mean, besides the obvious) than "murderers should be put to death because the Bible says so"?

Instead of discussing a bunch of pointless examples, let me cut to the chase:

I disagree with your premise that this is a "slippery slope" and should be avoided.

I mean, this is a slippery slope. Before Cloudflare took down TDS without any court order, they could argue that they took nothing down. Now they've taken down a site that hosted hateful extremist content along with a lot of other, more acceptable things, and further takedowns will likely be easier still to justify. That's a textbook slippery slope!

But my argument here was that treating political views and religious views differently doesn't make a huge amount of sense to me, since the content of those views can be almost identical.

If he changes it to "The Quran says the most evil of men are the Jews that all of them will be killed in the final battle"?

protected speech?

>The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.

Time to ban the Hadith, then?

Not letting Jews post Jewish content is different than not letting Jews use the service qua their being Jewish.

Protected classes are subject to rules prohibiting the expression of hate speech, even if they claim protection for their hate speech.

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