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Comment by sjwright | Hacker News Reader

Claiming that we must be reliant on private corporations for free speech is a corruption of the very concept. I don't agree with your argument, but to the extent that there's any truth to it the remedy can only be to fix the underlying problem—not submitting to it.

To be clear, my objection isn't to all online advertising but specifically to Zuckerberg defending Facebook's policy with an appeal to free speech. Obviously speech without funding is weak an ineffective, but if Facebook voluntarily chose to eliminate all political advertising, it is irrational to claim that your freedom of speech has been curtailed. Facebook's existence isn't promised to you.

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Claiming that one can meaningfully express free speech without relying on corporations is delusion.

If you aren't wielding the megaphone that is twitter/fb/youtube/whatever, then you are not going to be heard. That's just a fact at this point. Social media has in fact lowered the barrier to entry for expressing speech to large audiences, because before social media there were only newspapers and TV networks that cost significantly more and had significantly more preference towards specific agendas.

I understand the ideological desire for that not to be the case, and maybe society could stop and think how to fulfil that desire, but ignoring the facts of today is not constructive at all.

> If you aren't wielding the megaphone that is twitter/fb/youtube/whatever, then you are not going to be heard. That's just a fact at this point.

I disagree. This is only a blanket statement to be taken as fact.

Politicians have been doing town halls, focus groups, and public speeches for decades. Just because we suddenly have social media sites to project their voices to a mich larger audience doesn’t erase all of those. While spending on digital ads have gone up tremendously i’m sure, if we take them out of the equation, people will still be able to hear their candidates voices. Social media websites are not the be-all and end-all of political discourse.

I'm not ignoring facts; I agree we're probably never going to get away from a society where the "real" free speech is a privilege of the wealthy. I only seek to remind us of the principles which run deeper than the specific challenges of this moment.

> Claiming that we must be reliant on private corporations for free speech is a corruption of the very concept

I don't disagree with you! And I think if you'll look around, you'll see it is true. Your ability to get your viewpoint out is, perhaps more than at any other time since the 19th century, dependent on it being deemed acceptable by a handful of powerful gatekeepers. Between the incredible amount of consolidation we've seen in media companies, the dominance Google has on search, the dominance Apple and Google have on app stores, and the dominance a small handful of social media and messaging corporations have on communication, it's kind of amazing how few entities control what so many get to see in every context.

I really, really welcome suggestions on how to fix this. But I don't think pretending it doesn't exist is the answer.

First step would be banning political ads on social media platforms. And then everywhere else.

The problem with your initial argument is that paid political ads give even more power to the gatekeepers. It also overlooked the issue that more money equals more speech, meaning grassroots political movements are at an even bigger disadvantage because of the disparity of funds than if everyone had to get their message out organically.

The press is nothing more than a collection of private organizations and until the advent of the internet and sites to include facebook many of their shenanigans went unchecked.

the is the problem with free speech, you accept you will have both and good and hopefully with a preponderance of free speech the good will out weigh the bad.

once you start trying to limit who and where you give bad speech the edge because those who set the rules also determine which is which

the real threat to free speech and democracy is from those sitting in office successfully scaring the people into letting them set limits on who can say anything and what they can say when in reality the only group that should face any such limits are those in office and those beholden to them and the party they represent.

It's not possible to be fixed because the majority of people are apolitical, highly illogical and vain.

Democracy as a system dispowers the individual (what is a single voice in a sea of milions). It is perfectly rational to not vote (your single vote would never matter, while the time it takes to go vote will).

Since most people want to spend their lives infinity-scrolling a facebook feed, and for some reason political power can be derived from these people, then facebook will have power by deciding what these people get to see, and if it's not facebook then it's twitter, or google, or the ISP, or the department of the internet, or the TV channels, so on and so forth.

only 0.1% of people care about free platform.

Well, I'm sympathetic to where you're coming from, but this is muddled.

"Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one" has been a cliche for a long, long time, and while it is a little flip, there's a truth there. Your freedom of speech does not require me or anyone else to amplify it. Or even listen.

Put another way, do you believe you should be forced to tell other people my message? What about everyone else's?

What I will say is that both extremes are unworkable—from blanket bans to the authoritarian forcing of companies to publish poltical ads against their will.

Everything was fine back when the newspapers had a healthy tension between revenues and credibility. And when the sheer quantity of advertising venues was small and the advertisements devoid of third-order ulterior motives.

Until we can reign in the excesses of online advertising, it's more prudent to be cautious than dive further into the abyss.

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