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Surely you can be free to say whatever you want but a business doesn't have to do business with you. For example I could wear a Nazi T-Shirt with "Hang all Nigg

Surely you can be free to say whatever you want but a business doesn't have to do business with you. For example I could wear a Nazi T-Shirt with "Hang all Niggers" emblazoned in it, and a shop could quite rightly refuse to admit me to their store or refuse to serve me if I did go into their store. So why is it different for Google or Facebook to say "we don't want you as a customer"?

mantas 9y ago
That's what I'm saying. If it was truly freedom of speech, a shop couldn't refuse to serve you either.
- bmelton 9y ago
  By your definition, true freedom of speech would force me to open my home to Nazis so that they could come in and yell at me about how much they hate my consorting with Jews. In the real world, freedom of speech is generally free enough as it is, and in the example above, is in tension with my right to freedom of association. Yes, the Nazis are allowed to yell at me, just as I'm allowed to distance myself from them. If I own property, I can go one step further by going home and locking the door. I don't like Nazis, but Google's censorship here is giving me pause. Yes, of course they have every right to refuse to do business with whomever they like. Thankfully, so do I. If I don't care for Google's censorship, I'm free to use Spotify, or Pandora, or whatever other company (hopefully) makes a principled stand against censorship. At the end of the day, it's their house, and if they want to lock the door to keep Nazis out, I can't imagine any fair world that would force them to open those doors.
  - mantas 9y ago
    At least in my country, there're laws for disturbing public. Even if you shout "I love political correctness" too loudly and too long, you can be taken to custody and fined. If Nazis are such a big problem, secret service and whatnot should start looking into them. It's not a job of private company to enforce it's own point-of-view on the society. Wether it's correct not, but a private company cannot hold a a fair trial. And censorship without one is just wrong. I'd rather have a pissed off bakery serving gay cakes and coffeeshop serving nazi teaparty than letting a private company apply censorship.
    - bmelton 9y ago
      To be fair, in America we have "time, place and manner" restrictions for that sort of thing as well. > I'd rather have a pissed off bakery serving gay cakes and coffeeshop serving nazi teaparty than letting a private company apply censorship. I'd rather have bigoted companies free to be bigots, so that at least I could know who they are, and to avoid patronizing their business at all costs. The alternative is that they are forced to pretend to be not-bigots, I give them my money, and then they donate it to bigoted charities.
      - mantas 9y ago
        Or they'd fly certain flags high to attract certain clientele and make sure people they don't like don't come. Yet if you're in need, they'd serve you. I'm not talking about making everybody pretend to be not who they are. That's totally fine by me. If a bakery wants to fly a Nazi flag - so be it. But if gay couple wants a selfie drinking smoothies by said flag - that's fine.
larkeith 9y ago
The problem is really that a very few private companies have become core infrastructure providers on the Internet, effectively acting as the government of the net, however they face little to no regulation or accountability - Google, for example, is too firmly entrenched for consumers to realistically move to an alternative. So the question is, at what threshold (of size, competitors, etc) should free speech move from the corporation's policy to decide to the customers'? At one end of the spectrum, we've got corner stores, where there are a million options, and policy is decided by whoever's working at the time; on the reverse side, there are governments, who must inherently be monopolies, with policy decided by the voters. Google, cloudflare, godaddy, all fall somewhere in between, with the concern being that they fall too close to government in terms of power, while decisions remain made by internal managers, without user accountability.
- celticninja 9y ago
  But you are not being prevented from using the Internet, the shop is not preventing me from buying, just from coming in whilst wearing the t-shirt, take it off and I can shop freely. The Nazis can use the internet, they are not being barred from it, they are just not allowed to use Google or Facebook to display their message. I think that something like ifps.io may partially solve this issue as the Nazis could host their own site and individual nazis could provide storage and bandwith to keep it online.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Chaebixi 9y ago
    > they are just not allowed to use Google or Facebook to display their message. I think the concern is, what if Google and Facebook can be thought of as essentially being the internet. It's certainly true that the internet has gotten far less decentralized in the past decade. Google essentially has a monopoly on how people find information.

mantas 9y ago

That's what I'm saying. If it was truly freedom of speech, a shop couldn't refuse to serve you either.

bmelton 9y ago
By your definition, true freedom of speech would force me to open my home to Nazis so that they could come in and yell at me about how much they hate my consorting with Jews. In the real world, freedom of speech is generally free enough as it is, and in the example above, is in tension with my right to freedom of association. Yes, the Nazis are allowed to yell at me, just as I'm allowed to distance myself from them. If I own property, I can go one step further by going home and locking the door. I don't like Nazis, but Google's censorship here is giving me pause. Yes, of course they have every right to refuse to do business with whomever they like. Thankfully, so do I. If I don't care for Google's censorship, I'm free to use Spotify, or Pandora, or whatever other company (hopefully) makes a principled stand against censorship. At the end of the day, it's their house, and if they want to lock the door to keep Nazis out, I can't imagine any fair world that would force them to open those doors.
- mantas 9y ago
  At least in my country, there're laws for disturbing public. Even if you shout "I love political correctness" too loudly and too long, you can be taken to custody and fined. If Nazis are such a big problem, secret service and whatnot should start looking into them. It's not a job of private company to enforce it's own point-of-view on the society. Wether it's correct not, but a private company cannot hold a a fair trial. And censorship without one is just wrong. I'd rather have a pissed off bakery serving gay cakes and coffeeshop serving nazi teaparty than letting a private company apply censorship.
  - bmelton 9y ago
    To be fair, in America we have "time, place and manner" restrictions for that sort of thing as well. > I'd rather have a pissed off bakery serving gay cakes and coffeeshop serving nazi teaparty than letting a private company apply censorship. I'd rather have bigoted companies free to be bigots, so that at least I could know who they are, and to avoid patronizing their business at all costs. The alternative is that they are forced to pretend to be not-bigots, I give them my money, and then they donate it to bigoted charities.
    - mantas 9y ago
      Or they'd fly certain flags high to attract certain clientele and make sure people they don't like don't come. Yet if you're in need, they'd serve you. I'm not talking about making everybody pretend to be not who they are. That's totally fine by me. If a bakery wants to fly a Nazi flag - so be it. But if gay couple wants a selfie drinking smoothies by said flag - that's fine.

larkeith 9y ago

The problem is really that a very few private companies have become core infrastructure providers on the Internet, effectively acting as the government of the net, however they face little to no regulation or accountability - Google, for example, is too firmly entrenched for consumers to realistically move to an alternative. So the question is, at what threshold (of size, competitors, etc) should free speech move from the corporation's policy to decide to the customers'? At one end of the spectrum, we've got corner stores, where there are a million options, and policy is decided by whoever's working at the time; on the reverse side, there are governments, who must inherently be monopolies, with policy decided by the voters. Google, cloudflare, godaddy, all fall somewhere in between, with the concern being that they fall too close to government in terms of power, while decisions remain made by internal managers, without user accountability.

celticninja 9y ago
But you are not being prevented from using the Internet, the shop is not preventing me from buying, just from coming in whilst wearing the t-shirt, take it off and I can shop freely. The Nazis can use the internet, they are not being barred from it, they are just not allowed to use Google or Facebook to display their message. I think that something like ifps.io may partially solve this issue as the Nazis could host their own site and individual nazis could provide storage and bandwith to keep it online.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Chaebixi 9y ago
  > they are just not allowed to use Google or Facebook to display their message. I think the concern is, what if Google and Facebook can be thought of as essentially being the internet. It's certainly true that the internet has gotten far less decentralized in the past decade. Google essentially has a monopoly on how people find information.