Comment by repsilat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by repsilat | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> It's a very specific concept from the United States Constitution

This is completely incorrect, and it's a little insulting to the users here who aren't American.

Freedom of speech is a value with broad applicability. The United States Constitution enshrines a right to free speech as a limitation of government power, fine, but they don't have a monopoly on the idea. Relative freedom of speech is a characteristic of every forum in which speech and the suppression of speech are possible.

Banning users of a forum limits freedom of speech, removing commentary that goes off-topic limits freedom of speech. Forums are often quite free to set their own rules about who is allowed to say what, and users are often free to choose the forums they frequent, but that's mostly beside the point - speech within any particular forum is free to a given extent, and some people (be they owners, operators, users, whatever) believe that this freedom is intrinsically valuable.

(I don't really see this one as a free speech issue myself - to me, this one is about the credit card company preserving their brand integrity.)

Those words were indeed ill-considered; the concept dates at least into the English Bill of Rights about a century before the US one -- and of course it was also a value in the French revolution.

However, the point of the comment you're replying to still stands. If I merely say "We will only maintain a business relationship if you stop saying X, Y, and Z," then turning down that business relationship is not a free-speech issue. My sending you money to change the way you speak is not an abridgement of your freedom of speech, because accepting it is purely voluntary. It might be a matter of "selling out" but it's not a matter of "freedom of speech."

Cf. the FunnyJunk/Oatmeal debacle happening right now, where there was a tangible legal threat: "Take down your blog post or I will sue the crap out of you. Oh, and pay me thousands of dollars."

> If I merely say "We will only maintain a business relationship if you stop saying X, Y, and Z," then turning down that business relationship is not a free-speech issue.

I think if there's any problem here it was with the way it was put. I don't think anyone would have had a problem if Chase had said, "We're terminating our relationship with you because of your blog's content," but the idea of them suggesting he change to maintain the relationship seems to have struck a chord. Perhaps it would have been better to leave that possibility implicit, but... The more I think about it, the more I think this blogger is drumming the issue up to generate traffic to make up for his loss of revenue.

I'm not disagreeing with your statement about credit card companies, but to me it is hilarious that American credit card companies and banks still honestly believe that the customers think of them as brands which represent the epitome of honesty, integrity, and family values.

I sort of view them like politicians: grab bags of stinky stuff, and some bits of professed policy which I might find useful in narrow contexts. In that regard, they can be value-ranked, and value-rankings within demographic groups can be brand managed.

We know that, and they know that, but its still crucial to keep up the mechanisms of being honest,etc.

Consider the jewellery chain in the UK that sold cheap junk. Customers knew it, and the company knew, but everything was profitable until the CEO explicitly said the wares were junk. Then the sales went into free-fall.

It's not necessarily that they believe that. It's that they desperately need their marketing material to represent that. Quite probably because they realize it's a potential weakness in their image.

The blog post is from an American blog, so noting that specific concept of freedom of speech from an American point of view is perfectly fine in this case. And in the American concept, freedom of speech is a constitutional concept regulating what the government can do to individuals.

actually, he's Canadian, now living in America w/ Citizenship

American citzens are often called.... Americans.

Even in America, we have a concept of freedom of speech that extends beyond the First Amendment. Obviously his Constitutional rights have not been abridged, but that doesn't mean that it's not a free speech issue.

No, it isn't a freedom of speech issue, not in any sense of the term, and conflating this situation with it devalues the concept greatly. He has all of the freedom of speech he desires. One's freedom's do not extend to coercing others.

He was not forced to do anything - he was given a choice: either we continue to pay you, and you abridge one line that we don't like being associated with our product, or you keep on saying whatever you wish and we have no requirement to pay you.

Both parties are free to set any terms (as allowed by law) on the deal which both will agree to. If both don't agree to the terms, you have a standard failure to negotiate a deal. If one does something in the future which causes distress to the other party, the other party can certainly demand redress. If the party which caused the issue refuses this, why should they be forced to submit to his whims with no freedom of their own? And what does that have to do with freedom of speech? He's still saying what he wanted to say, is he not?

>He was not forced to do anything

By that standard, nothing short of cutting your tongue off would be an infringement of your freedom of speech. Under the Sedition Act of 1918, nobody was "forced" to do anything; they were just imprisoned if they said bad things about the government.

This sort of hyperbolic conflation is exactly why it's stupid to relate a business transaction to "free speech." There is exactly zero relationship between what I said and putting people in jail for speech. (FYI: putting people in jail for saying things that you don't want is equivalent to forcing people to say what you do want.)

I was tempted to not reply since the comment was being downvoted, but clearly you've garnered some support for your argument giving the people the running the credit card company the right to choose whom they pay for what services and why is equivalent to incarcerating people for speaking their minds.

The argument you're making here, is that every company must -pay- people for exercising their free speech, even when it harms the company. By your argument, it's a violation of a person's free speech for a company to fire its spokesman after they go off on a racist rant on-air, and that marketing firms should be paid by their clients even if they chose to make an ad which disparages them?

Since when does your right to free speech take away my right to association?

Not only do I entirely agree with this, but the title of the blog post makes it seems like he was acting less out of a concern for free speech and more out of a desire for attention. "Hey guys, look at me! I'm giving up money for free speech!"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com