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Comment by ArnoVW | Hacker News Reader

Actually, I am Dutch, but have lived in the UK and am now living in France. I agree that "freedom of speech" is less of an issue for the average European, than for an average American. But Angela Merkel for example critisized strongly the actions of Facebook, Twitter et al.

You may agree with private entities censoring now, because you disagree with the censored statements. What if the roles are reversed? What if Mark Zuckerberg runs for president and uses his platform to this end? What if whomever-you-disagree-with pays private entities to censor your newspaper / internet site?

Democratically defined censorship, enforced by the state is one thing (and already complicated). Censorship without all those guarantees is, IMHO, quite another.

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My bad. =)

But anyway, I do agree that there is a problem here, in that some corporations have way too much power. I would argue that the solution is that those corporations need to be regulated and broken up into smaller parts.

So, I think we need to do something about amazon, but in this case, we also needed to do something about parler, and now amazon did that for us.

The zuckerberg example: I would argue that in that scenario, it would be (at least) equally obvious that said regulations where needed. The difference would be that in that scenario, I would argue that zuckerberg was abusing his power, but with what's happening now, I don't think that amazon is abusing their power, (because I think that amazons reason is a valid one), but I still think that they shouldn't have that much power.

I'm a bit tired, but hopefully I'm still making some sense.

> But Angela Merkel for example critisized strongly the actions of Facebook, Twitter et al.

If we’re talking about her recent comments, I think “strongly criticised” is a reach. The comments were essentially “Twitter was right to flag Trump's inaccurate tweets about the 2020 U.S. election, banning his account altogether was a step too far ... governments, not private companies, should decide on any limitations to freedom of speech”.

She missed the fact that freedom of speech in the US doesn’t protect incitement to violence, by law that was decided by the legislature.

The Financial Times disagrees with your assesment. They also note that Alexei Navalny agrees with her.

https://www.ft.com/content/6146b352-6b40-48ef-b10b-a34ad585b...

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