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Not at all. The whole thing about freedom is that people should be free to say what they want because they should also be able to listen to what they want. Nob

Not at all. The whole thing about freedom is that people should be free to say what they want because they should also be able to listen to what they want. Nobody ever made the point that free speech means you should not be able to block people. This is dumbfounding. The point about freedom is that communities can gravitate towards the moderation that suit them as opposed to a centralized one decided by an elite that has no counter-balance since they banned everyone who rebutted them. And no, it doesn't really mean "then Twitter is right to ban everyone because they are private" since we're far from being in any kind of free market. Existing regulations, powerful existing lobbies and de-facto monopolies mean we should strive towards a complex balance.

danShumway 4y ago
Tesla is a private company, Musk firing people is not the same thing as a community self-organizing and gravitating towards moderation that suites them, it is literally one elite person making decisions for the entire rest of the company. I personally believe that freedom of association is an important part of the First Amendment and while I think that Musk has a thin skin and is abusing his power to censor his employees, I also think he has the right to do that. But at the same time, it's ridiculous for anyone concerned about public censorship to compare entirely personal blocklists to firing someone from a company or banning them from a place of business. Musk has (some) right to censor people at his companies and he has a lot of right to choose who he does business with, but I also have the right to call him a hypocrite whenever he waxes poetic about censorship ruining people's livelihoods, as if your boss firing you because of a Twitter post is somehow worse or in any way different than your boss firing you or denying you severance pay because of a public blog post. > And no, it doesn't really mean "then Twitter is right to ban everyone because they are private" since we're far from being in any kind of free market. If you think that Twitter should have different rules because it's big, then the answer to that is to either break it up or nationalize it. Certainly, the answer to "this thing is too big to be bound to the whims of one elite person" is not to privatize it under one elite person.

danShumway 4y ago

Tesla is a private company, Musk firing people is not the same thing as a community self-organizing and gravitating towards moderation that suites them, it is literally one elite person making decisions for the entire rest of the company. I personally believe that freedom of association is an important part of the First Amendment and while I think that Musk has a thin skin and is abusing his power to censor his employees, I also think he has the right to do that. But at the same time, it's ridiculous for anyone concerned about public censorship to compare entirely personal blocklists to firing someone from a company or banning them from a place of business. Musk has (some) right to censor people at his companies and he has a lot of right to choose who he does business with, but I also have the right to call him a hypocrite whenever he waxes poetic about censorship ruining people's livelihoods, as if your boss firing you because of a Twitter post is somehow worse or in any way different than your boss firing you or denying you severance pay because of a public blog post. > And no, it doesn't really mean "then Twitter is right to ban everyone because they are private" since we're far from being in any kind of free market. If you think that Twitter should have different rules because it's big, then the answer to that is to either break it up or nationalize it. Certainly, the answer to "this thing is too big to be bound to the whims of one elite person" is not to privatize it under one elite person.