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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

> As I’ve said before, the problem here isn’t the guidelines themselves: hate speech has no place on the App Store.

If you agree with policing hate speech, you have to accept the consequences.

Of course the 1st amendment currently only limits the actions of the US Govt. and corporations are free to ignore it. But this situation can't last.

In a world where every expression of speech utilizes a medium provided by a private corporation, free speech needs to be enforced at the corporate level.

Much like a corporation isn't free to discriminate against a person on the basis of race or religion for hiring purposes, it shouldn't be able to refuse to publish something because it finds the content objectionable.

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This is ridiculous, you want to force my company to host your hate speech? Bullshit, you're now removing my rights, to enable your own. It's the internet, build your own platform and say whatever you want.

> you want to force my company to host your hate speech?

Yes I do! If you don't want to host hate speech, don't go into the hosting business. Sell groceries or something.

Now you want to limit what I can do for business because you want to be ignorant online. That is beyond arrogant.

It's similar to how I would expect my ISP to not block the websites of competing ISPs. That's forcing the ISP to have content move through its system that it may not like.

It's the same logic behind forcing private businesses to ban smoking on their premises, and the same logic behind forcing photographers, bakers and florists to provide artistic services to celebrations they abhor: 'if you don't want to do X for everyone, according to the rules and regulations we have promulgated, then don't do X!'

The sad thing is, most folks don't want liberty for others.

I certainly don't want unchecked liberty for others, or myself. I want intelligent, compassionate, and humane liberty, meaning that you can do whatever you want as long as you're not hurting someone else.

Say I take the grocery example from above. And I have unbridled liberty, and I now don't allow any black people to shop there because in the original texts of Mormon, the lord cursed Cains seed, and the black skin curse was to identify the cursed. Now if there are 30 grocery stores in town, who cares. But say I'm in a small town, and there are only two, and we're both Pre-1978 Mormon believers. Now black people in the town can only eat at the Chick fil a. Well, Chick fil a decides to also have this policy, and now there is no place for the black populace to eat. The only option to the black people is to open their own store, except no one will sell them the food, and no one will sell them the land, and no one will sell them... anything. I effectively own the black populous because I can get them to work for food. Oh, and it's not racism, it's religion.

I don't care what ideology you have, it must not suppress human rights.

I'm not really a fan of this libertarian "My house, my rules" approach. To a person voicing a controversial (or non-controversial or just plain stupid) opinion it does not matter who exactly silences them. The US constitution might protect from the government, but ultimately it's not exclusively the evil government suppressing one or the other thing, and in the end it don't ever matter who did it. In the end a thing that was considered so important government (usually completely sovereign) might not touch it, goes away.

And no, this is not the internet, it's a iphone and the apple appstore, I can't build my own. Cydia does not count, that exploits a bug, that could be closed anytime.

You're completely barking up the wrong tree here.

Apple has every right to only publish material they find suitable, and that's exactly how it should be.

The problem is that Apple has set it up so that what I can install on my hardware is determined by them. I don't get to make my own choice. Apple makes it for me.

The solution is to mandate an option for jailbreaking or sideloading on users' devices. Then Apple's opinion doesn't matter anymore. They can filter however they want, and I can install whatever I want, just as it should be.

Forcing Apple to publish things they don't want to publish is going about it all wrong.

It's almost like you're talking like you think you own your iDevice because you paid money for it.

I know, I'm clearly stuck in the past.

Your solution would be a welcomed first step... However the "free market" counter argument is "just buy Android", and it's unclear whether Apple's hardware is "yours"; aren't you renting it from your network operator? Are you free to resell it?

Anyway I maintain that if all of publishing is controlled by private companies that are not answerable to the 1st amendment, then there is not much free speech anymore.

The argument that private companies should be free to not publish whatever they want for any reason applies just the same to hiring; and yet everyone is ok with the fact that companies are not free to refuse to hire someone for any reason: some reasons are acceptable, some are not.

I'm just advocating that there should be acceptable reasons to not publish something (it's bad) and unacceptable ones (we don't like what it says).

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