Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

> Fear of punishment works on most bosses of news media outlets and internet platforms. If they slip up and allow the wrong content to reach the public, they may not be sent off to do hard labor in a detention camp, but they could be demoted and their day docked

Can't help but note that Twitter declined to deplatform Trump for years - long before he was elected president - because he was good for business. When they finally did kick him off (yes, yes, as is their right to do as a private organization), they defended their actions by insisting that they were afraid that he might do or say something that the government might hold them legally liable for. AWS said effectively the same thing when they kicked the service Parler off of their servers because - a degree of separation away - Trump might do something on Parler that AWS might end up in legal trouble for.

This reasoning doesn't make sense since every person or company using any public platform or any public cloud infrastructure can do bad. Person who does "bad" is liable for it not underlying platform.

For example politicians who don't like Bitcoin say something like "Bitcoin is used for drugs" yea but dollars and euros are used for drugs as well so it makes no sense to say Bitcoin is bad or declare any person using public service as good or bad.

So equating banning a user to the rights of a private organization might be a _little_ disingenuous? Some might say a straw man for the fact Twitter did so out of fear of liability pursuant of a government which deemed that user's opinions offensive? Would Twitter have removed the authors of the US constitution for fear of legal liability from the Crown? Isn't that, like, the reason the first amendment even exists? So does the government have constitutional ground to stand on for deciding what is misinformation or illegal speech, private platforms or not? Evidently so. Because... private company?

>So does the government have constitutional ground to stand on for deciding what is misinformation or illegal speech, private platforms or not? Evidently so.

Courts have constitutional ground and duty to judge and decide upon laws and constitution.

In Machiavellian terms, what better way to help ingratiate your company with the incoming administration? Especially since the outgoing one will no longer be able to retaliate.

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