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Comment by rmatt2000 | Hacker News Reader

rmatt2000

If a private individual can do this, imagine how easy it is for the U.S. government to suppress content that it doesn't like on social media.

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Harder for the state, in the USA. The constitution has something to say about that (IANAL)

Are you implying that the TLAs follow the law?

Because their track record says otherwise.

Harder does not mean impossible. There's more scrutiny and more recourse when the government does it, but you're right it doesn't always stop them.

On paper, sure. In practice government doesn't really have to worry about government trying to make an example out of them though and has access to the kind of violence and benefit of the doubt evil corporations could only dream of.

Frankly I think it's a bit naive to imply that big government organizations aren't just as evil and terrible and self serving as big corporate ones. Their error bars of evil overlap a lot.

There is also very little consequence for the gov and very little recourse for the citizen in practice. In the event that someone has the resources to challenge the government, any victory is blunted by the award coming from their (and all of our) tax dollars.

The Constitution doesn’t stop them from requesting or paying for a service, just ordering companies to do it. This is how they are allowed to buy all your location data, and how the cops usually get all your data from social media (no subpoena needed, they just ask), and how it is that crime perpetrators are zapped off social media almost instantly before regular people can look their posts up.

There’s a big, big loophole that people overlook here. FAANG etc have whole departments of people dedicated to voluntarily turning your data over to the state.

* on centralized censorship-based social media

It is important to self-publish and not be a sharecropper for billionaires by donating your content for free to their walled gardens.

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