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Comment by zarkov99 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe companies should be idelogical neutral instead? Or do you also think liberal America should start to appeal to conscientious and patriotical people so they can have their own armed forces and police?

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You can't rule that 'corporations are people' when it suits you, and can donate to political campaigns...

... and then say "no, they need to be ideologically neutral" when they act in ways you dislike.

Who is "you" here? Why do you assume I subscribe to corporation are people? Maybe stick to the actual point being made?

Anytime that someone says 'you' on the internet, the actual you should assume that they aren't speaking about the actual you specifically, but to the collective you that makes the argument that corporations are people.

I am sorry but that does not make sense.

Why not?

Companies have some of the same rights as people. Why should we expect companies to be neutral when we don't expect people to be neutral? Governments must be neutral, including armed forces and police, but even then neutrality doesn't mean letting one group break rules (laws in the case of government) with impunity just because they're the ones who most frequently break those rules.

Liberals have a stranglehold in Tech. This will probably never change, its not the result of a conspiracy its simply an emerging phenomenon that arises from the over representation of traits like openness and curiosity in left leaning people. However, this is not fair nor good for the nation and it floors me that this is not obvious to any fair minded person. There are other sectors of society that have symmetrical proportions of conservatives. Farming, for example. Should farmers choose to feed only conservatives? Of course not. This isn't about left and right, its about a modicum of empathy, of fairness to all, including people who think differently.

My grandparents were farmers; my parents programmers.

Remember nearly everyone used to farm, including the ancestors of liberals. Today's right wing "family farmers" are the people who were most stubborn or least able to learn new things as their way of life shrank and not the representatives of farming in general.

I am not sure I get what you are trying t say here. Whatever way we came to the demographics the fact remains that different occupations have very different proportions of liberals and conservatives so we best able to treat each other fairly because we need each other to function as a society.

Why should they be neutral and how would you enforce that? What does "ideological neutral" even mean?

Because corporations have disproportionate effect on the public and their mandate is to make money not proseletize whatever brand of BS the CEO happens to believe in.

Ok, then define "neutral" and how it would be enforced.

It is a tough problem. I think social media companies should treated more like utilities than publishers and should not be held responsible for their content beyond removing illegal materials. I think they should provide their users with the tools they need to moderate their feeds themselves, with an emphasis on transparency and user control. We do not need Twitter and Facebook to protect us from each other.

> I think social media companies should treated more like utilities

I don't think that's a good, or even workable solution. Social media companies are not public utilities.

I may have used the wrong term. I do not mean utilities in that sense, I mean they should act as carriers rather than publishers of information. That is more like the phone company and less like the NY Times.

If the Internet companies want common carrier protections like generally not being responsible for user actions, they have to act like a common carrier.

I'm saying this as someone who thinks Twitter in general is stupid, Trump behaves like a clown on Twitter and the best outcome would be if everyone stopped using Twitter.

But you cannot have it both ways, and in that particular issue he is right.

Maybe companies should be allowed to do whatever they want on their own websites

Companies cannot be neutral. They have a base just like any politician. Twitter has acutely recognized - I believe - that their base is libera, and it's important to go along with that base. Would Twitter be as popular if a conservative was running it?

What difference would it make if Twitter was run by a conservative or a democrat as long as they were not meddling with the content? And if they are meddling the content, do you not think that this very dangerous given their dominance as a medium of speech? Just run the thought experiment, imagine that Twitter's leadership held political positions you abhorred and was free to boost or suppress speech, what Dorsey calls the "global conversation", in order to advance those politics. Does that sound OK to you?

I think we are in agreement. I don't want Twitter meddling with content, regardless of who runs it. My opinion is that the outrage would be different if it were run by a conservative. The American two-party system seems to require us versus them, even in how twitter is run.

Ideological neutral by whose standards? If conservatives tend to violate TOS more frequently and get blocked/banned, then that is neutral. They are simply enforcing their TOS based on the content.

Do you really think that the 50% of the population that is conservative is really much more prone to asshole behavior? Does that really make sense to you?

When the 50% you're talking about was notorious for calling people snowflakes and betas, yes I do believe they are more prone to advocate for violence, racism, and hate speech.

As opposed to notorious for calling people violent, racist and hateful, since those are just accurate assessments, right?

Are you disagreeing here that Republican voters are not more prone to those behaviors than Democrats?

Yes, I am. Both parties have assholes and both parties have great people in roughly equal proportions. The exact shape of the insults the shitty people throw at each other does not matter .

My kneejerk reaction would be that the worst of both sides are equally bad, but the proportions are wildly different.

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