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Comment by Zetice | Hacker News Reader

The only war against freedom of expression is the constant threat of no longer allowing private organizations their freedom of speech by letting them publish what they want.

Society doesn’t have a censorship problem, we have an entitlement problem. People now apparently think they’re entitled to someone else’s platform, when they’re not.

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It's one thing for instagram to not show things; it's quite another for the government to even request they not.

No it isn’t, not so long as Instagram is the one making the decision.

The the government requesting your employer fire you is ok as long as your employer makes the decision?

That’s not how the law works.

The government can’t limit speech, except in rare exceptions. Making suggestions to limit speech is still limiting speech.

Absolutely, request away, and yes it is absolutely how the law works. Anyone can ask for anything, you’re free to just say no.

You do not have an absolute right to free speech when it impinges on the free speech rights of somebody else.

An entity that has power over you "asking" you to do anything is inherently coercive.

The point is they don’t have power, as stated in the First Amendment.

That's a nice legal fiction, but realistically, they did until the moment the courts stepped in and told them to back off. Unless there are severe consequences for unconstitutional actions, the abuse always comes first.

...none of this is what the parent comment was talking about in their claim that there is a "war on free speech".

You are confusing de jure power with de facto power. Government has shown, again and again, that they will abuse and overstep without any legal right to do so. In the meantime until the courts catch up, that coercive power imbalance still exists.

I literally just said this isn’t what the person I replied to was talking about. I’m mistaking nothing.

The other issue is often it is government employees who have been paid by laws passed by congress (appropriations) making these requests. So the act of making the request potentially makes the appropriation a violation of the first amendment. I don’t think it’s a stretch to interpret the government using money to pay people to request twitter to remove protected speech as ‘abridging free speech’ and such appropriations as congress passing a law. There is similar case law for how publicly funded universities must conduct themselves. Though, even though you could make a similar argument for how public universities work I suspect courts have used a different argument to justify that framework.

But it’s very weird to me that universities run by the state must be viewpoint and content neutral in their speech restrictions even if there is no explicit law passed by the government to restrict speech but the government is allowed to employ a mass of people to make ‘requests’ and such requests don’t need to pass a viewpoint and content neutrality test. The situations are very similar because in both cases there is not an explicit law passed by the government punishing people for making bad speech.

This is simply not true.

A request from someone with power is bound by law.

I went through a ton of government contract law training. I can’t request that my contractor wash my car. I can’t “just ask” that they work unpaid labor. Etc etc.

It’s one thing if a rando or equal power requests. But a person in authority can’t do that.

Imagine all those jerk bosses saying “I just asked my secretary to perform fellatio on me. I didn’t require it. And I never even threatened to fire them.” That defense doesn’t work just like the courts found that the government requesting isn’t allowed.

It is factually incorrect to claim a request from someone with power is bound by law.

You can absolutely do those things as a matter of law. You can’t do those things as a matter of policy, however. You were trained on policy, written out of an abundance of respect for the law, training it’s clear needs to be more common, but the law itself is less clear.

What I mean is that the person making the request is bound by law to not make those requests.

The government needs to follow the laws that bind it. And making an illegal request is just that.

I didn’t mean that you are legally required to follow the request.

They are not bound by law not to make those requests, they are bound by policy.

No, the courts have ruled that the law prevents these types of illegal requests. Policy was created to make it easier for the government to follow the law.

They have not, this is false.

The problem, as you can see in the story we’re commenting under, is that often requests from the government can imply (either intentionally or not) the threat of retaliation or force.

The government spends a lot of time making requests of private companies, of other governments, and of individuals. But they have a duty to avoid crossing the line and applying unfair pressure to coerce the response they want.

Agreed, the threats were going too far. But those are clearly being dealt with, and not in any way indicative of a free speech crisis such as what was referenced to in the parent comment.

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