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Comment by beebmam | Hacker News Reader

YouTube isn't the government

What's your point?

The concept of free speech is 2400 years old. Don't be one of those people that conflates that concept with the American first amendment which only blocks government censorship and is barely 200 years old.

Private companies, groups, and people can and do infringe on everyone's right to free speech.

In the time when the 1st amendment was written (which is not a holy document that decides all morality. Nor is the U.S. the center of the universe) corporations as we understand them did not really exist. The people that were concerned about free speech could only conceive a hostile government of King George could really suppress them and the people willing to hear their dissident ideas. They were rich local gentlemen that had public squares and private meeting rooms. It did not occur to them that they could be silenced by the local placard maker forming a cabal that would deny any attempt to express themselves.

Times have changed and the public square is dead.

The public square is alive. There are people in my downtown right now with megaphones uttering their own flavor of insanity. You also have more reach than ever before in human history thanks to the fact that anyone can pay a few bucks a month and set up their own website with their own rules.

And the right to free speech has nothing to do with you getting your ideas heard. It's everything to do with what you can and can't be prosecuted for, and therefore is irrelevant when we are talking about something like youtube which can't prosecute you in the first place. Even back then the law could have said something like everyone has a right to get their essay published in the newspaper, but it didn't, because you can imagine how that would quickly get ridiculous, and ultimately just like youtube newspapers were private entities, only they had even more influence and reach than youtube since everyone read them and took them seriously as the paper of record.

Note that the OP didn’t quote the First Amendment, he cited a number of powerful speeches/writings about free speech. The two are as similar as the concept of a rectangle and a piece of paper.

In our internet age, the freedom of speech that truly matters is ALL digital.

The US has no Public ISP, nor Public Speech Platform equivalent of Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc.

That's correct. The US government should have equivalents of Twitter, Google, Facebook and so on, though. And then speech on those platforms would be protected by the 1st amendment, including spam, pornography, and so on.

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