4 ms·

Censoring speech is completely counter to everything this country was built on. Every corporation doing this, YC included, is plainly undermining our freedom of

Censoring speech is completely counter to everything this country was built on. Every corporation doing this, YC included, is plainly undermining our freedom of speech. Using the public square exception, while also censoring and editorializing, creates a moral hazard, wherein the offending corporations are are actually publishers that ate not responsible for the content they publish, yet they are benefitting from it. There are no "community standards". There are corporate rules and censorship. We are not a community if we can't have free speech. We are subject to a corporation that is publishing and benefitting our content, subject to their terms and political beliefs.

ciabattabread 5y ago
Twitter is a private platform that has a 1st amendment right to exercise editorial control about what happens to their own platform. Same for a blog with a comment section, a restaurant review service, a moderated forum about tech news, an image sharing service. It shouldn't matter how large a corporate entity is. Same for the cable news networks. Same for newspapers and magazines.
- gonational 5y ago
  Correct. But then they cannot enjoy the protections that come with being a "Public Square". You don't get to choose "OK I'm going to be a publisher/editor of content, but I will enjoy the protections of being a Public Square". Currently all of these companies are breaking the law, it's a known thing, but nobody is doing anything about it, same for the Logan act and many other laws that we have that are broken all the time and nobody enforces them. If you're a publisher the size of Twitter of contact, then it's much harder to create a monopoly, because you need to spend countless millions of hours per week editorial editing content to make sure that none of it is illegal/defamatory/etc. Having the protections of a public square well only pretending to actually be one is fraud.

ciabattabread 5y ago

Twitter is a private platform that has a 1st amendment right to exercise editorial control about what happens to their own platform. Same for a blog with a comment section, a restaurant review service, a moderated forum about tech news, an image sharing service. It shouldn't matter how large a corporate entity is. Same for the cable news networks. Same for newspapers and magazines.

gonational 5y ago
Correct. But then they cannot enjoy the protections that come with being a "Public Square". You don't get to choose "OK I'm going to be a publisher/editor of content, but I will enjoy the protections of being a Public Square". Currently all of these companies are breaking the law, it's a known thing, but nobody is doing anything about it, same for the Logan act and many other laws that we have that are broken all the time and nobody enforces them. If you're a publisher the size of Twitter of contact, then it's much harder to create a monopoly, because you need to spend countless millions of hours per week editorial editing content to make sure that none of it is illegal/defamatory/etc. Having the protections of a public square well only pretending to actually be one is fraud.