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Comment by aaomidi | Hacker News Reader

Yeah by the fact that the free market created these platforms and gave them power.

Us on the left have been fucking telling everyone for years that these companies are dangerous but everyone else embraced them.

These companies yanked the plug on many leftist communities and dozens of social media networks for sex workers. To this day VISA and Mastercard don't allow payments to come in if the website is mainly sex related.

Where the hell was the outrage then? We begged people to support us and tell these companies to back off but no one did.

The inaction of everyone has lead to this. Welcome to how "free market capitalism" actually just means dozens of small unaccountable governments with more power than hundreds of countries combined. You asked for this. Take it.

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My only quibble with this is that “the left” is a bit broad — SESTA/FOSTA was bipartisan legislation unfortunately spearheaded by my Democratic representative, Carolyn Maloney.

Other than that, this is spot on. Conservatives have been happy to tell everyone to let the free market decide, only to cry foul when the market makes a decision they don’t like. Turns out you can’t have it both ways.

As a big proponent of the free market, I think the problem stems from "sometimes free market."

Also, it seems that these moves by tech companies are acting in unison (Apple, Google, Amazon) to the satisfaction of one political party (that just happens to have won 2 branches of the federal government).

It’s possible that that they’re trying to get in the good graces of the incoming administration. It’s also possible that they’ve wanted to do this all along, but feared legal retaliation from the outgoing one. (The latter feels kinda gross, as they could certainly weather the retaliation better than the people they’re trying to protect now).

It’s also possible that this truly just happened to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Regardless, my general inclination with regard to these companies is that we should have a free market but break up any one that gets large enough such that getting kicked off presents a moral issue. VPS is highly commoditized, so I don’t really care that they got kicked off AWS, but Facebook and Twitter are a bit thornier.

Hopefully condemnation of violence and the removal of digital systems that enable violence is bipartisan?

If it isn’t then morally they should side with the party who is against violence.

If it isn’t then financially it is prudent to side with the side that will keep the advertiser dollars flowing. (Biden won 70% of the economy and the majority of the people, especially the wealthy and well educated)

No one on the left considers Democrats to be "on the left"

> the free market created these platforms and gave them power.

I'm pretty sure our tax dollars fund DARPA. [+] A substantial portion of the technology we're talking about here was funded by Public money.

[++] So when making all these fine points about discretion of private companies regarding the use of their platforms, it must be remembered that none of FANGs would even exists without technology and both military contracted private and academic research that were funded by American taxpayers' money.

This is pretty lackluster reasoning, it would follow that since Benjamin Franklin was the discoverer of electricity and DARPA Net came from that so....

Taxpayer funding has no bearing on the commercialization of products down the road. It is not a special case of intellectual property...

I'll return the favor and consider your reply as a strawman. But even then, let's compare Ben Franklin's capital outlay vs the Federal government's in DARPA.

Issue is not IP. Did I mention IP? There are extant congressional records of discussions in Congress regarding gifting this technology to "business" in service of the American public (one presumes). There is an implicit social contract at work here.

DARPAnet is as far from Twitter as the Wright Brothers Flyer is from a 747. There is no implicit social or legal contract. A gift is well a gift. No backsies.

Here, Here!

>Where the hell was the outrage then? We begged people to support us and tell these companies to back off but no one did.

>The inaction of everyone has lead to this. Welcome to how "free market capitalism" actually just means dozens of small unaccountable governments with more power than hundreds of countries combined. You asked for this. Take it.

There was no inaction. The inactivity was intentional. Things were going great. Bank balances were going up, everything was centralizing, everyone else putting off the difficulty of learning to actually make something and keep it free.

The last 4 years has injected more jade into my worldview than the rest of the years of my life combined.

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