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Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

I'm not so convinced about that reconciliation! Most media in general is not conducted through individual entities.

Even the small film maker or newspaper is usually going to be organized as an LLC, even if it is just a single person trying to submit their film to a festival or something. These should be subject to governmental regulation if they touch on political topics? I think this is significantly thornier than you're making it out to be.

> Campaign finance is equally simple: run your campaign on public funding. Give all candidates who meet a threshold equal amounts of money.

Right, where it gets tricky is with unaffiliated individuals and what counts as a campaign expense versus speech or normal business.

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That's why they're intrinsically linked.

If you mandate that non-human entities have an 1st amendment right, you cannot have meaningful campaign finance limits.

Ergo, because it's worth having campaign finance limits, in the interest of allowing the best candidate / idea to win, I think it's worth threshing through stripping 1st amendment rights from non-human entities.

Regarding how one weighs what sort of speech would then be allowed and disallowed is a difficult problem, but the above needs to happen before it can even be started on.

Now, we have a frankensystem where reality (unlimited finance) and policy (limited finance) differ, which is never a healthy state.

my point is that stripping non-human entities of 1st amendment is effectively repealing the 1st amendment in the US, if it allows the government to regulate newspapers/printmakers/movies based on political content. so your point is essentially that campaign finance trumps 1A, which might be true but i am not so sure

> stripping non-human entities of 1st amendment is effectively repealing the 1st amendment in the US

Human individuals would still have a right to speak whatever they feel.

And arguably, I'd extend that onto platforms above a certain size that can verify human identity (ideally anonymized after verification).

IMHO, newspapers/printmakers/movies do need to be regulated.

They deserve rights, but those rights should look very different than individual 1st amendment right.

Which seems reasonable -- nobody would ever confuse Alphabet-the-company with me-the-individual-person in terms of capability and capital.

What a terrible idea. Giving government the power to regulate newspapers/printmakers/movies can't possibly produce better outcomes than what we have now. Preserving maximum freedom of expression is far more important than any election result.

> Preserving maximum freedom of expression is far more important than any election result.

I guess that's where we disagree.

To me, democracy starts from elections with equality of opportunity.

Anything shy of that corrupts the very foundations, and we've been trending shyer for a long time.

Is it any surprise we get increasingly concentrated wealth (world wars aside) with a set of policies that allow spending unlimited money to buy votes?

It's an interesting point. Whether non-human entities are entitled to 1st amendment rights. Since they have the potential longevity that far exceeds humans, and also can't be punished in same manner for potential wrongdoing (i.e. send an entire company or lobby) to prison.

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