Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

I would love to see a law that for corporations, once the corporation exceeds some commercial threshold (e.g. 1M customers or 10M/year revenue or whatever) then you are no longer allowed to discriminate against your users for any reason other than violation of non-discriminatory terms of service.

I don't think that companies that achieve near-monopoly status should have the right to arbitrarily cancel, shadow ban, hide from search, delete content, flag content, "fact check", label, or otherwise interfere with users' use of the service.

This is not a "free speech" issue, it's a "when you have monopoly power and positioning in the market, there are no alternatives" issue. Visa refusing to process CC payments because they don't like your politics, is not a power that I want them to have.

If you're a tiny boutique company, discriminate to your heart's content. When you get big, I don't want you to have that power anymore. If you don't like it, then eschew the current fashion of companies to value growth over all else.

I'm baffled by how short sighted and ignorant this line of thinking is.

I'm not sure I agree with this, though I think it's an interesting idea.

The threshold you've suggested seems way too low. 1M customers or $10M/year revenue isn't "near-monopoly", it's barely a player in the game.

Completely fair, and maybe the idea isn’t the right way to do it, but I am frustrated with the cancel power that many companies wield in our society and hadn’t seen this proposed anywhere. And corporations are controlled by people, usually a small number of people with unbelievable ability to wield power:

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5839cf32e4b000af95ee5b68

The problem is defining what those "non-discriminatory terms of service" are and applying them evenly to everyone. That's why Facebook is making a theoretically independent content review board - things aren't black and white, especially in today's climate in which people just deny facts. Trump's issue with Twitter illustrates this point - he's just factually incorrect about a lot of his voter fraud claims, but he calls it discrimination against his view point and he's got millions of people who support him in that.

So where's the line? I think anti-vaxxers should be censored because their viewpoint causes actual harm to people, but they would obviously argue otherwise. You can say that anything that causes harm is not permitted and call that a non-discriminatory term of service, but whenever you apply it, the person you're applying it against is going to claim discrimination.

A lot of people don't like FB's stance of letting anything go in terms of political ads, but they don't have a good alternative, because otherwise any stance they take will face claims of discrimination. In that case, I think the government should be defining what is acceptable content for political ads and leaving it to FB to enforce, but of course the people in government are more biased than anyone.

It is, to say the least, a tough problem.

Do you feel the same about email spam filters?

I think it’s completely in the control of the users, so it’s ok. Also I can always look at what was filtered and “fix” mistakes. Likewise, I have no problem with a button that a user can press that says “I don’t like this person, don’t show me their stuff anymore”. I just don’t want the company to press it for me as if the content never existed.

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