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Comment by riffic | Hacker News Reader

The fundamental principles of the internet haven't changed. If racists want a platform, they can have it and the underlying web standards still exist for them to make it themselves and to self-host it.

If their providers want to cancel these business relationships, that is their right as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_association

What is really problematic and has been since its inception is the overuse of commercial and centralized services by public institutions and organizations. Twitter and other services of that nature are not public utilities.

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I wonder if Twitter think they had a business arrangement with the Grand Wizard.

Wikileaks and Julia Assange are commiting crimes were they in the US. There is a long list to cut.

You fail to see whats coming next.

In 1997 the big tech platforms lobbied that not only they wouldn't censor views, that it was basically impossible for them to do so.

This is what allowed the internet to grow without onerous regulation (ie they were treated as a carrier not a publisher).

Now that big tech is moving towards "being publishers", you're now going to reverse it all and cause massive regulation to take place. In the end, "the internet" will look no different than mainstream tv.

>In the end, "the internet" will look no different than mainstream tv.

I worry about this, but I also suspect we're heading in a direction that will mostly avoid this fate. However, even if given a hard binary choice between TV land and the current popularity of hatred that Duke exemplifies, I wouldn't have to think on it.

The merchants of war and division thank you for helping in this effort.

The censors aren't stupid, of course they are going to go after the David Dukes first, then over the next decade watch how the internet slowly transforms into a massive establishment mouthpiece.

Maybe explain to your kids, "we were afraid of bad words".

And yet we were okay with sharply curtailing freedom of association in some areas. Twitter (or a landlord) would be in legal trouble if it tried to ban black people.

Edit: To the replies pointing out the protected class distinction: I'm well aware of it (as my example shows). What I am highlighting is that "freedom of association" isn't as absolute as the parent post implies, and that in the past the law was changed and that freedom was diminished when it allowed behavior we didn't like.

There is a marked difference between race and opinion. You can't change the color of your skin, but you can change your opinions or keep them to yourself if you wish.

Anti-Semites are not a protected class. Political opinion is not protected in private space. The policies of these private platforms are clear and available for anyone to read, and include a ban on racist speech. If you want to stay on the platform, follow the rules.

You have no control over what color you were born, and you can't change it. That's why race is a protected class and opinions are not. Free speech only protects us from the government, not from private consequences.

I'm sorry, I didn't know that being a racist was a protected class now.

Saying blacks deserve to be a protected class is pretty racist you know.....

All races are a protected class. You can’t discriminate against white Europeans either.

In fact, if you were to start a group that wanted to destroy white Europeans (like how the Klan wants to destroy non whites, Catholics, Mormons, Jews, and sanity itself) then you would quickly find yourself ostracized.

I would bet an anti white group would quickly find itself branded as a terrorist organization in the US.

I assume your implication is that Twitter is banning conservatives, as opposed to the other interpretation, which is that conservatives, regardless of what forces are to blame, have a higher ratio of participants who are worthy of being banned from a non-political point of view (e.g. actual racism, higher desire for violence, etc). Reality might be somewhere in between, but it seems obvious to me that it is very close to the latter.

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