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Comment by hart_russell | Hacker News Reader

And once again we’re back in 2018 trying to figure out whether these private companies should be considered “public squares”.

I personally think speech censorship, even by a private company, is wrong. However, there’s so much grey area that one could argue either way.

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> speech censorship, even by a private company

It seems to me that Facebook (or at least Mark Zuckerberg) actually agrees with you and wants FB to be an open platform, but are being pressured by activists to censor against their wishes. This kind of goes beyond "they're a private company, they can do what they want": it would appear that they can't do what they want.

I am just amazed that people are for private companies censoring politicians. You really don't want to see everything politicians want to tell you? Even if it's a complete lie? You want Mark and Jack and others to hide that info from you?

What is going on? I feel I am completely losing touch. It's scary.

People keep jumping between the extremes of “show or don’t show the post”

There are options in between like decrying the post for violence. Twitter did a good job here IMHO by having the post visible, but restricted behind a click through. They also didn’t cast aspersions on it, and sent you to more links to learn more.

We need a better framework for discussing speech issues in general. Even here arguments devolve into semantics over what the first amendment applies to when we should really be discussing how we actually expect/want society to function. Maybe we can adopt RFC language. Example:

  must: A law should/does enforce this
  must-not: A law should/does forbid this
  should: You have the right to NOT do this, but I believe this is what should be done
  should-not: Although you have the right to do this, I believe you shouldn't do this

  social media platforms (must|must-not) have the right to police speech
  social media platforms (should|should-not|must|must-not) police speech

This Trump stuff is a red herring. I'd be more curious what people think about Facebook letting the anti-vax movement run wild and helping violence in Myanmar.

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