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Comment by flyingcircus3 | Hacker News Reader

If a twitter user blocks another user, is the blocked user being censored because they can't speak to the user that blocked them? Is this infringing on their free speech?

If someone spams twitter with billions of messages, to the point where just about the only thing anyone sees are this one person's messages, would it be censorship to ban that person from making posts? Is this infringing on their free speech?

If someone posts instructions on how to make explosives using common household items, is it censorship to ban that person? Is this infringing on their free speech?

If someone posts information that misleads people about when and where to vote in an election, is it censorship to ban that person from posting? Is this infringing on their free speech?

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>If a twitter user blocks another user, is the blocked user being censored because they can't speak to the user that blocked them? Is this infringing on their free speech?

Case law in the USA says yes https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/us/politics/trump-twitter...

That outcome is solely because Trump was president and in that case is the government.

Blocking someone else from speaking is also a form of speech, there is no right to be heard outside of the government silencing you.

If not then I have a right to use your property to tell you what I think and you're unable to do anything about it.

A parallel situation appears to me as, someone on the street is talking to people walking by, to avoid hearing them I put on noise canceling headphones and walk away so I don't see them.

Am I censoring them, no. I am not interrupting their ability to speak freely. I'm simply exercising my right not to listen.

Banned twitter users are all free to type out what they would have tweeted, while twitter exercises its right not to listen to, and subsequently distribute it. A more apt analogy is that the person is using someone else's public address system to speak to a lot of people efficiently. Third parties may just keep their head down and ignore it, but the owner of the public address system can and should have standards of what their willing to amplify. The owner is also not restricting the speech of a person he refuses to amplify.

Sure. As long as they become legally co-responsible for the speech they are choosing to amplify, i.e. as long as they accept they are no longer just a platform.

This would be a violation of freedom of association, which is why it's not a thing.

> This would be a violation of freedom of association

No, actually. We force public businesses to not discriminate based on race, and we have laws that for the telephone company to send almost all calls on its network.

Nobody would say that those laws break our rights to freedom of association.

Similar laws could be place on social media companies that we already put on telephone companies, even if they wouldn't be exactly the same.

"being a jerk online" is not a protected class.

You didn't contradict anything that I said.

I said that companies are already forced to do certain things, but few people would say that this is some huge infringement on free speech.

Ex:telephone companies are forced to carry certain calls, but most people would not say that there is a huge free speech infringement here.

Therefore, these existing laws could be expanded to other things like social media.

So, in other words, this statement is wrong "This would be a violation of freedom of association".

Telephone companies exchange legal liability for the content of what they carry, for not changing fee or pricing structures based on the use of their lines. However, they also charge fees for the use of their service to their end users.

People do not pay for the services in question here, so the idea they have a right to them is on shaky ground to begin with - i.e. if I give away free lemonade, I'm under no obligations to give it away to any specific persons.

But more importantly, there's a big difference between a transactive exchange between two parties, and a broadcast one: the telephone company is not obligated to advertise who uses their services or how they use them, whereas Facebook is a publishing platform that does - which goes to the question of association. You can discreetly use a telephone line: you cant discreetly use Facebook without Facebook branding.

So what does the proposed law then look like? Facebook is obligated to host your content next to the "Facebook" logo? Does the logo have to be there? Does the service have to be similar? What if Facebook decide your content just doesn't qualify for their branded tier, and instead will be hosted on "QuietBook.com", which they don't SEO optimize? Suppose you have a comment section on a personal website - why are you now allowed to remove comments there but Facebook isn't allowed to remove comments from it's service?

You have once again not contracted anything that I said. What I said was that we have laws that force businesses to do certain things, and very few people would say that these businesses are having their rights infringed on.

> So what does the proposed law then look like?

Well, what we could do, is take existing laws and extend them to social media companies. Such as the existing common carrier laws, or anti-discrimination laws.

> if I give away free lemonade, I'm under no obligations to give it away to any specific persons.

If you had a lemonade store, in a mall, and you were giving away free lemonade, but you refused to give away lemonade to black people, then you absolutely would get in trouble with the law.

Like c'mon. How did you not think of that immediately? I even referenced this in a previous comment.

> Facebook is obligated to host your content next to the "Facebook" logo? Does the logo have to be there?

Well, just take every single question that you asked, and apply them to if a store wanted to treat black people differently, and then you have your answer.

So whatever hypothetical you have, imagine if it was about a company being forced to follow certain laws, that prevent them from discriminating against black people.

And the answer to these hypothetical, is that if a company attempted to do these things to black people, then it would likely be disallowed.

And very few people would say that there is some large infringement on these companies rights in that situation.

So again: if I have a comment section on my personal blog - can I remove abusive comments? Ban abusive users? Can HackerNews ban or downvote comments so they're not seen? Can TalkBack radio screen which callers it puts on the air?

You can write a law to do whatever you want, but the reason rights like freedom of association are enumerated is because things will go very, very wrong quickly when you undermine them. Freedom of speech is protection from government sanction for voicing your ideas, but freedom of association is protection of your being compelled to act due to the arbitrary desires of others.

> If you had a lemonade store, in a mall, and you were giving away free lemonade, but you refused to give away lemonade to black people, then you absolutely would get in trouble with the law.

No you wouldn't. You'd be in trouble if you ejected people from the premises on the basis of race, but there is no case-law which requires you to give away goods and services to anyone. But this comparison is completely irrelevant because "your opinions" are not a protected class, nor would they ever be.

Holding people legally responsible for speech means censoring speech the Government doesn't like. Holding people legally responsible for relaying other people's speech as long as they don't relay all speech, is essentially the same thing as banning the selective relaying of speech. For example, it would be impossible for Twitter to determine if any factual claim about a person or company would be considered defamation before they relay it, so they would essentially be forced to leave the US if they didn't want to relay genocide advocacy or whatever else they may have a moral objection to help spread.

That's what I find so frustrating about this debate. The people who claim to support free speech actually support more censorship by the Government. They seem to want the Government to be the sole judge of what is acceptable to say. That's the exact opposite of what I want. I want for nobody to be prevented from saying anything and for nobody to be forced to help anyone say anything. Both of those rights are equally important parts of freedom of speech.

> That's what I find so frustrating about this debate. The people who claim to support free speech actually support more censorship by the Government.

You have mis-interpreted.

People are saying that they should be treated like the telephone companies.

Do you think that the telephone companies are some massive apparatis of censorship and anti-free speech?

I don't think most people would say that. I think that would people would say that the laws that force the telephone company to do certain things, results in very little censorship of the phone network.

> Both of those rights are equally important parts of freedom of speech.

So then, telephone companies.

Do you think that the laws regarding telephone companies are some massive infringement on free speech? Because I think most people would say the opposite, that are laws regarding them help prevent censorship.

Everyone claiming that Twitter and other social media companies are infringing on their free speech are arguing that these companies must allow broadcast messages.

Telephone companies do not allow normal customers to broadcast messages. A telephone call is a targeted communication. You are calling one person, or perhaps a handful of people. Additionally, there are laws that (at least attempt to) prevent spamming and robocalling. Telephone users also have the right to be taken off of companies call lists.

> Telephone companies do not allow normal customers to broadcast messages. A telephone call is a targeted communication.

> there are laws that (at least attempt to) prevent spamming and robocalling. Telephone users also have the right to be taken off of companies call lists.

None of what you just said changes the idea that it is pretty silly to claim that these types of laws that force telephone companies to send certain messages are some huge infringement on free speech.

The laws that apply to phone companies are well accepted in society. And they could be expanded to other large communication networks, as they currently are well accepted and are not considered huge infringements on free speech, nor do people say that they support censorship.

So Twitter is a publisher? So Section 230 ought not apply to them?

Sigh.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-...

> they can't speak to the user that blocked them

To be fair, the primary effect of twitter blocking isn't to prevent the user performing the block from seeing the person tweeting, the primary effect is preventing the blocked user from commenting on particular parts of the site-- and preventing third parties from seeing their messages.

Reddit recently switched to this model too: if you block someone they can't comment in threads where you've participated unless they're a moderator.

I understand why-- just blinding yourself to someone harassing you just lets them defame you unchallenged. But a block function that mutes people is vulnerable to abuse.

> If someone posts instructions on how to make explosives using common household items, is it censorship to ban that person

god forbid anyone get access to information available for free in every public library in the US, or with 30 seconds searching online.

As far as I’m aware this is incorrect. A user who is blocked by another user is not prevented from commenting in a thread that the blocker participates it. It’s just shown a hidden message thing and they can’t reply to that specific message. If another user comes in and comments , they can reply to that comment.

On Reddit , a blocker can make it so that a user cannot participate at all.

Thanks for the correction, -- I've never been a twitter user so I only know second hand and was probably letting my understanding of how reddit works color my understanding.

If twitter bans any mentioned of a laptop full of any incriminating evidence right before the election...

You don't know what's on that laptop and you don't know if it's incriminating

well yes that was the whole point of censoring discussion of it and the media lying about its providence. "you can't prove" because everyone who should have been interested in the truth was interested in protecting their team.

The point of censoring the laptop was to help Biden and Twitter was wrong to do it. However the information on the laptop hasn't been released and yet you stated it was incriminating. This is probably why Twitter tried to block the story, because voters will be swayed without evidence but since there are a large number of media outlets the story got out anyway and the attempted censoring amplified the mistrust.

Why do you think there is evidence of wrong doing when all the information you have is that he has a laptop?

information from the laptop was released...you just didn't see it because it was censored.

Can you provide a link to it?

it seems like most of it has been taken off the internet, aside from specific emails on some news sites, and no search engines are helping me find the original material.

I didn't follow this story that closely but I don't remember the information being released at all. In fact Tucker Carlson claimed he had the data being mailed to him, it was lost in the mail, then they found it but he decided to not release it because he felt bad for Hunter Biden.

But false stories of Russian collusion weren’t censored.

To be fair, those stories only became false after conservatives said the word "hoax" enough times. When actual Russians met with actual members of the campaign, and shared poll data, and distributed hacked materials, the stories weren't yet false.

How is that related to what information is on the laptop?

That's not what happened.

thats exactly what happened.

There were plenty of people talking about the topic on Twitter after they decided to block the Post story.

plenty of people got banned

Yes, for linking to the Post story or tweeting its content in one way or another. There was no ban on simply tweeting about Hunter Biden's laptop.

The laptop with zero chain of custody which has passed thru a great many hands?

At least the portion that consists of google DKIM signed emails have an adequate chain of custody!

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