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Comment by greenduck | Hacker News Reader

Not only is our view of free speech different today, but the US has a long history of censoring minority groups. Take the Hays code for instance which made it de facto against the law for movies to portray gay men in a positive way or "race mixing" at all. That was around until nearly the 70s. That's still within living memory [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Co...

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Liberals fought against the Hays Code. And now they condone Twitter and Facebook on the same premise as those who defended the Hays Code: that its private actors voluntarily policing speech that’s harmful to society.

I think this argument proves too much. Clearly there is speech for which you support Twitter and Facebook suppression, and there is speech for which people here do not. We generally oppose any restraints that operate in the overt service of bigotry, and some of us don't oppose private restraints on unhinged conspiracy theories.

I also strongly object to the notion that liberals somehow own this, when clearly both sides of the spectrum instrumentalize speech and its suppression when it suits them.

> "I also strongly object to the notion that liberals somehow own this, when clearly both sides of the spectrum instrumentalize speech and its suppression when it suits them."

Both sides might do it but it's against the tenets of Enlightment liberalism to do so, so of course those claiming to be liberals justifiably get called out for it. If a person eats meat, they don't get to call themselves a vegan; if a person is okay with suppression of speech when it benefits them, they don't get to call themselves liberals.

Respectfully, I think that's a silly argument. "Liberal" isn't a label any modern (20th or 21st century) liberal chose for themselves. By way of example: "enlightenment liberalism" doesn't tell us much about whether property taxes should fund schools or whether teachers should earn merit pay, but the term "liberal" or "conservative" strongly suggests what someone believes about those issues. It's about as persuasive as coming up with some definition of "conservative" that conservatives fail to meet.

In a discussion like this, about American policy, the right thing to do is just to accept the working definition Americans use; otherwise, all we'll do is argue about semantics, and the debate we're having over social media sites suppressing things isn't about semantics. It's substantive.

I mostly hear liberal as a term used by some people to label their political opponents. Though sometimes they strengthen it to libtards.

What does "de facto against the law" even mean?

The Hays code was an industry-imposed form of censorship, there were no actual consequences, legal or otherwise, to ignoring it.

Might of well be against the law as the entire industry enforced out

The Hays code (and MPAA ratings, etc.) was a preemptive effort to avoid congressionally imposed rules. If they hadn't followed the "de facto law", there would have been a real law.

Expanding on what katbyte said, the Hays code was adopted by every major studio in the US to replace state run censors. They did this because of the same battle going on right now in social media: "if we self regulate, then we won't need government regulation placed on us." When an entire industry agrees to follow the code and has enforcement options available and does it with the threat of government action if they don't follow it, the only difference between it and a real law are the name. The consequences to ignoring it were that your funding was dropped, the offending scenes were removed from the film, or you were kicked out and blacklisted from the industry. They were apparently pretty strict about it. You can tell that by how stringently it was followed for decades.

And the big players had a stronger monopoly than seems possible today. Downloading obscure foreign movies isn't quite as easy as Netflix, but in 1960 what wasn't on TV or a few screens was just about unobtainable for almost everyone.

(I guess paying for these downloads runs into a similar situation, mastercard & friends choose to ban things they aren't legally required to.)

They were likely taking issue with the statement “de facto against the law.” De jure is by law and de facto is in fact, and using them how that poster did does not make sense.

At the time, movies weren't protected by the First Amendment, so many states and cities had active censorship boards and there was discussion of federal regulation. The Hays code was an attempt to establish nationwide standards that would satisfy the censors.

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