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Comment by elpool2 | Hacker News Reader

There are people who would like the government to outlaw racism/hate speech on social media. The first amendment prevents that. I think r3trohack3r's point is that eroding those 1st amendment rights to outlaw hate speech would be worse than the actual hate speech.

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I believe the general concensus is that it doesn't because private media companies aren't public spaces, so the company rules. How far the company enjoys freespeech, whether it extenda to their users and who gets to define hate speech I don't know, but lible is criminalized already and further analogies aren't impossible.

I mean, I could call a hackernews a punk ass neoliberal cunt and wait what happens next.

This stops being true when U.S. government officials (including publicly elected officials and folks in 3 letter agencies) get involved with those moderation policies.

I think it’s still an open question whether it’s acceptable for government officials to be involved in any way with the moderation policies of a company outside of the 1st amendment including:

* asking for changes to moderation policies

* asking for enforcement of existing policies

* passing lists of users to be watched for policy violations

* etc.

Which has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen until the courts figure out whether or not the U.S. government is allowed to launder away 1st amendment protections through collaboration with private companies.

This is true, but the first amendment should also prevent the government from pressuring said companies to censor speech as well. This would be the government using it's power and coercion to violate people's 1st amendment rights via a third party. Think "hiring someone to murder someone is still murder for the person hiring," or a police soliciting a trespass.

The recent "Twitter files" showed that the government is/was working directly with Twitter and probably all the media companies to censor speech. The government, on multiple occasions, provided specific tweets and people to censor and Twitter complied. I believe they had weekly meetings to do just that.

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