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Comment by birken | Hacker News Reader

I'll go one further... if even 1 single person (the person who owns HN), decides that they don't like the content of that comment, then they should be free to delete/censor the comment on HN and ban the person in perpetuity from HN.

Your argument doesn't really make any sense because everybody here is talking about speech in the context of a walled garden owned by a company/person. That is a completely different situation than what you are alluding to. I can just as easily prevent the reverse question: I have a blog with a comment section, and somebody I don't know posts a horrific, rude and distasteful comment that I don't want associated with my blog post. Can the government force me to not delete that due to free speech, or do I have the power to moderate my blog however I want?

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>Your argument doesn't really make any sense because everybody here is talking about speech in the context of a walled garden owned by a company/person.

Did you read GP? If they were talking about comapnies and not governments, it certainly was not made clear:

>However, with the proliferation of the internet and social media, it has become easier for governments to monitor and regulate online content, and this has led to increased scrutiny and debate about the role of government in moderating online speech.

>[...]In short, the collective well-being of humanity should always be a top priority, and this includes moderating harmful or extremist content on the internet.

Where was GP talking about companies?

> Where was GP talking about companies?

The initial comment says government has always used their influence through "newspapers", "television" and "social media", all of which have historically been non-government entities who take the government's input and decide if they want to follow it or not. There are obviously major historical cases in which private companies have defied what the government wanted them to do (NYT v Sullivan, NYT vs US, etc), but I'm sure there are countless examples throughout Twitter's history of the government asking for something and then not getting it, but I assume that isn't something those instances are not being highlighted that much as they don't fit the narrative.

That's perhaps a fair reading of the initial comment, although reading "regulate" in "it has become easier for governments to monitor and regulate online content" and "moderating" in "the collective well-being of humanity should always be a top priority, and this includes moderating harmful or extremist content on the internet" to both mean simply "government input" is somewhat questionable. See also your own use of the word "moderate" ("Can the government force me to not delete that due to free speech, or do I have the power to moderate my blog however I want?"). Also your point that historically non-government entities can decide whether to follow government input or not needs to be qualified considerably. Contempt of court was not considered free speech until relatively recently. for example see Los Angeles Times contempt of court 1938. Then there is of course the Sedition Act of 1918. In any case this is very far from your claim that "everybody here is talking about speech in the context of a walled garden owned by a company/person." We are most certainly talking about government here. Whether or not the initial comment was refering to government simply "giving input" or outright censoring, we are still talking about government, so your claim is in my view inaccurate even under your own explaination of the comment, which is itself somewhat questionable.

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