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Comment by dsnr | Hacker News Reader

> Some people seem to think that freedom of speech is something that can be broadly forced upon private organizations, and that’s simply not true.

Why not? Private companies must respect your rights, like your right not to be discriminated against, so why can‘t they be forced to respect your right to free speech? Just because the status quo of the legal ecosystem is not ready to handle this edge-cases doesn‘t mean it can‘t be made to do it with some adjustments.

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Because your rights do not override my rights, and if I run an Internet forum, chat service, etc you can’t force me to publish or distribute material I don’t want to. We are all autonomous citizens, including people who own or run communications services.

You can’t sell food without compelled speech (nutrition labels). You can’t sell medicine without compelled speech (side effect warnings).

There’s plenty of existing examples of compelled speech. We could simply say, “you cannot run a public/large forum without allowing mostly free speech”.

Who gets to define “mostly”? Every public Internet forum censors, whether they say they do or not. Even the *chan sites filter out and delete spam, griefing, child porn, etc. They have to or they would be overwhelmed and useless. The spammers have been advocating for maximalist free speech forever.

I think the compelled speech argument is extremely weak, we have very narrowly defined and specific cases in strictly defined circumstances. This would make it the default for vast swathes of common communications and as I pointed out introduce huge problems with noise, spam and griefing.

There's a difference between you running "a" forum and controlling 99% of the internet. It's good to break up huge monopolies.

Amazon Web Services does not control 99% of the internet.

They control ~32% of cloud services (https://www.parkmycloud.com/blog/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-clou...), and I assume if Parler moved to GCP they would be also blocked. Question what would MS Azure do?

That mostly leaves Alibaba Cloud (I have no idea if it is available outside China) and "Others" - so a 43%. Not much to choose from considering that the big players have the best prices.

This may be slightly off topic... are hosting providers subject to Sec. 230 protections? That is, if they don’t make a good-faith effort to remove illegal content (i.e. incitement of violence, bonus points for elected officials) they can be legally held responsible?

I see what you mean with giving equal weight to all rights, but there are implementation differences. To not discriminate, you’re restricting an action that might be taken. That does not incur cost or new effort. To facilitate speech, you’re compelling an action to happen that someone may not want to do, especially one that doesn’t provide any benefit to them and may incur additional costs.

The right of free expression is guaranteed by the first amendment by restricting the government from infringing upon your right. It doesn’t say the government or anyone else has to give you a microphone.

What about compelling a company to respect a citizen‘s rights? Do you find that fair? Companies are already compelled to do all sorts of things for the government or customers.

In order to ban me from a platform you have to take (negative) action towards me. My content is already on that network. Compelling to respect my rights means compelling a company to not negatively act against me.

They are not compelled to do anything for general citizens. They are in some cases compelled to treat certain classes of people the same way they treat other classes. That doesn’t compel them to do something they never would do, it compels them to do the things they already do for some, for all.

Those businesses are also free to close up shop if they can’t handle it. If they are dumb enough to explicitly say they don’t want to do something for a certain legally protected class of individual solely due to their belonging to that class, then IMO they deserve to lose their shirt.

>Why not?

That would amount to involuntary servitude, which is not permitted by the 13th Amendment.

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation

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