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Comment by onewhonknocks | Hacker News Reader

Free speech as it is enshrined in the Constitution only applies to censorship by the government.

It's a value so important to society it is included in our most authoritative laws.

While individuals and private entities are not obligated to follow that law because it is direct at the government people can rightly complain that it is in bad taste when they stray too far from holding themselves to the same standard.

A private entity banning confederate flags and nazi symbols in avatars is palatable enough on its own. But it is decently close to having to censor those sorts of things in legitimate historical contexts. See for example all the genuinely historically centered youtube channels that have to censor those symbols because otherwise the algo will bury them. I think we can all agree that that latter case is not ok and is the kind of censorship that should be complained about. Considering how many historically themed video games there are out there and how strongly people believe in free speech it's understandable why more than a few people do not like this move by Twitch.

I think the short answer is that society simply doesn't value it as much today as it did in the past. We're just seeing the consequences of that slow change in attitude. These days it's more important to have low-effort, smooth relationships with everybody at once.

When machine translation gets so good as to be transparent, correct, and effortlessly ubiquitous, we'll probably see more cross-cultural communication. And along with it, a bunch of additional clashes, new taboos, and additional reduction in the range of acceptable expression. I probably say things that someone halfway across the planet thinks are abhorrent all the time, and I only get away with it because we're not interacting yet.

I think laws should have some flexibility, even frameworks (e.g. US Constitution). The cultural leeway given by freedom of speech is being abused at scale even by foreign entities. We can't just say well because the founding fathers wanted something one way it could never change or adapt to new problems. If you allow no censorship at all the platform becomes a cesspool.

What are your (or anyone's) thoughts on why 1A was written to be limited to the government in the first place? Why didn't the author (James Madison) of the Bill of Rights write it more broadly, preventing even private entities from limiting speech, et. al.?

Not the person you originally applied to, but in my opinion this is most likely because corporations used to be extremely restricted in other aspects. Corporations were limited to operations listed in the charter they applied for and often could be immediately dismantled if they were found to be doing anything in violation of the law.

This mostly changed due to 'corporate personhood', the idea that corporations should have the same rights as people.

This article goes in to a lot of how this has lead to corporate abuses of power:

https://repository.uchastings.edu/hastings_law_journal/vol41...

This one's an easier read, but basically an editorial on the one above:

https://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate-accountability-histor...

So that one private entity can tell another that they are talking out of their hat, and show them the door.

You have a right to free speech. You don’t have a right to force everyone to listen. What a fucking awful world that would be.

My initial reaction is to agree with you re: "fucking awful world", but I wanted to explore that a bit more. Would it actually be terrible if we had to allow people space to say what they want on a digital platform?

What would the side effects be of not being able to remove people from your store because they're behaving in a way you don't like? What if YouTube could not, legally, remove content that was "abusive" or "hateful"?

(Again, not saying I think this is how things should be, just trying to entertain the idea a bit.)

This needn't be posed as a hypothetical. There are places, both in the Internet zoo and in the real world, where you can go and look to see what this becomes.

Because the only communication platform (mail) was the government.

This is a little naive, you don't think private delivery services existed?

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

That says founded 1844, over half a century from when the Bill of Rights was written.

While I dont particularly care about confederate flag, the constitution is not a bible. Constitution also does not defines broad meaning of the word censorship. Censorship can be used for private censorship as well, the only difference is that the constitution is not preventing it.

The discussion about what is and what is not reasonable censorship should not be limited to constitution and its meaning.

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