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"the first amendment doesn't say you can do this, so you can't" is such a deliberate misread of what the Constitution provides that I'm shocked this court could

"the first amendment doesn't say you can do this, so you can't" is such a deliberate misread of what the Constitution provides that I'm shocked this court could issue the ruling with a straight face. 1A is not prescriptive (it does not say, here are the things you are allowed to do and therefore if it's not on this list you can't do it), it's restrictive (here are the rights government can't take away). Emphasis on government in that last part. In some twisted way, the court has ignored this, and said "it's ok for the government to force a private entity to express a certain speech." Which is in direct conflict with the supposed protection granted by 1A against the government restricting your ability to choose what to express on your website!

throwoutway 4y ago
Interpreting corporations as “people” IMO was such a misread of the constitution that it’s led to various interpretations here. These are corporations, not people. We need to stop applying people’s rights to corporation and then we’ll return to logical deductions
- yasp 4y ago
  How do groups of people not have the rights of people?
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    They already do, as people.
    - refurb 4y ago
      A group of people together have no right to free speech but individually they do? I don’t see how that could possibly work.
      - woodruffw 4y ago
        Who said that? They continue to have rights within the group as well, and they can make whatever group decisions they would like. This doesn’t imply that we need to accept corporate personhood for all purposes.
      - klysm 4y ago
        No this is not what he said. You don’t need to treat the group differently. Since all people have free speech in the group, then the group effectively has free speech as well no?
        refurb 4y ago
        Right, which is basically what the Supreme Court said. A group of individuals as a corporation still have constitutional rights.
      - Jon_Lowtek 4y ago
        Arguing in favor of making clear legal distinctions between humans and corporations does not automatically imply denying them a right to free speech. It may seem that way when we say: the declaration of human rights does not apply to corporations, because they are inhuman, but we actually argue in favor of a declaration of corporate rights, not against it. The key point is that Corporations are more than just groups of people. But more so we want this distinction because we want an effective Corporate Criminal Law.
      - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
        We give corporations certain legal rights that humans do not have, such as the ability to avoid individual responsibility for corporate crimes or debts. It sort of makes sense that you can't stack rights - you either get to choose your human rights, or your corporate rights (which may have limits that your human rights cannot).
    - yasp 4y ago
      That's a non sequitur.
      - woodruffw 4y ago
        You asked: How do people, as groups of people, not have the rights of people? I answered: They do, as people. Nothing about their position in or outside of groups affects that. Where is the non sequitur?
  - notservile 4y ago
    Corporations exist as creations of congress and legislated into existence. Congress may not pass laws that seek to silence our ability to speak freely. What you’re suggesting is that because these special entities are run by private individuals and not government employees they’re not effectively bound by the first amendment. Schools exist as creations of legislation as well, but they are run by government employees. Speech cannot be silenced by schools. Your assertion is that since companies, created by legislation, are run by private individuals they can silence speech all day long. The question is, does the 1st amendment apply to government employees or anything borne out of legislation by congress?
  - throwoutway 4y ago
    Let me ask you the inverse— should an entire HOA all go to jail if one resident commits a crime? No. It’s not “groups” of people, like you’d find at a concert/meetup/HOA/whatever. If it was, then the whole group should be convicted of crimes everytime the corp ignores a law and commits a crime. But no— different groups exist for different purposes, on paper incorporated under a set of laws. It’s a business, intent on generating profits and many times they break laws. Next time you want a corp to have ”people” rights, consider the inverse to
    - stickfigure 4y ago
      > Let me ask you the inverse— should an entire HOA all go to jail if one resident commits a crime? If all the people in the HOA conspire to commit a crime, using the HOA organization meetings to plan, HOA funds to execute the crime - then yes?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- notservile 4y ago
  This is precisely it. Corporations exist as creations of congress and legislation. Can congress and legislation be used to create entities that can then be used to surveil, and curtail our freedom of speech? If so, isn’t congress passing legislation that limits free speech through an intermediary?
- krapp 4y ago
  The rationale is that corporations are made up of people, and there is no way of denying fundamental rights to corporations without also denying those rights to the people making up and interacting with those corporations. In essence, corporate personhood an argument that rights don't cease to exist when being expressed in aggregate. It also allows certain conveniences, such as being able to sue a corporation as an entity, and corporations being able to enter into contracts as entities, own property, etc.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  While I agree that corporations should not be considered people, there’s literally a century of legal precedent built on that faulty interpretation, and the courts are not the appropriate forum to unwind it; it’s too deeply enshrined. Congress must legislate.
  - _8j50 4y ago
    Courts can legislate by precedent as well.
    - torpid 4y ago
      Actually, it's considered legislating when stare decisis is abandoned.
  - Afforess 4y ago
    Didn't stop the Supreme Court from reverting the Roe v Wade "superprecedent" recently.
  - throwoutway 4y ago
    So we can agree that some interpretations are bad/wrong/illogical?
- _8j50 4y ago
  Thank you! This is what I am saying, treating corporations as people has caused so many problems it might just destroy the whole country! Non-US folks pay attention and make sure this cancer doesn't spread to your country.
  - hyperman1 4y ago
    AFAIK this is normal in other countries. In Belgium, we have the distinction between a natural person (a human) and a legal person (might be a corporation), and laws specify the required personhood.
    - _8j50 4y ago
      So too late for Belgium?
- throw0101c 4y ago
  > Interpreting corporations as “people” IMO was such a misread of the constitution that it’s led to various interpretations here. These are corporations, not people. Corporations have been legal persons for many centuries/millennia: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#History The same principle applies to (professional) societies, communities/municipalities, guilds, unions (locals), universities, etc: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University#History Be curious to know about the legal history of treating legal and natural persons differently.
  - throwoutway 4y ago
    I’ve been reading what you linked and I see nowhere that the all the same legal rights of PEOPLE were applied to corporations for millennia. Not sure if you actually found that either? Either way, I’m arguing that it is an unintuitive idea in light of the fact that the Bill of Rights was written with people in mind as the recipients of those rights, and not corporations. If Google suddenly invoked their “right” to bear arms and form well regulated militias, we wouldn’t be swirling our oat milk saying “well they have the right”. I’m arguing they shouldn’t
    - throw0101c 4y ago
      > I’ve been reading what you linked and I see nowhere that the all the same legal rights of PEOPLE were applied to corporations for millennia. Not sure if you actually found that either? Ability to partake in contracts, due process of law, have internal rules of conduct (like having a conscience). Are these not rights that both both 'types of persons' have? > There are therefore two kinds of legal entities: human and non-human. In law, a human person is called a natural person (sometimes also a physical person), and a non-human person is called a juridical person (sometimes also a juridic, juristic, artificial, legal, or fictitious person, Latin: persona ficta). * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_person * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juridical_person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juridical_person IANAL.
gfodor 4y ago
No, the ruling claims the 1st Amendment is irrelevant in determining the regulation of censorship because censoring speech is not speech. They go on to claim the 1st Amendment has a role to play in determining permissible restrictions on corporate censorship since such censorship can lead to a chilling effect on public speech. But they reject entirely the premise that forcing companies to platform speech is a form of regulating corporate speech. I'm not going to comment on that conclusion, but your comment is a complete mis-frame of the argument, at least by my reading.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  > No, the ruling claims the 1st Amendment is irrelevant in determining the regulation of censorship because censoring speech is not speech. This flies in the face of ample SCOTUS precedent--which the 5th Circuit is obliged to follow--that the 1st Amendment also provides a freedom from compelled speech as well as freedom of association.
  - dannyw 4y ago
    Common carrier laws are the exception, however. Arguably, the big tech platforms of today have more power and influence over the public square, than ISPs did in the past. It's very possible for two reasonable people to come to the opposite conclusions about whether the act is constitutional.
  - gfodor 4y ago
    Well good news, odds are SCOTUS will clarify.
  - tarakat 4y ago
    SCOTUS also ruled that the 1st Amendment allows compelling a mall (a private entity) to host petitioners, which is strikingly similar to this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._Robins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R... And we were happy to throw freedom of association under the bus to enforce civil rights.
    - 4y ago
_8j50 4y ago
Hold on there! "Private entity"? As I recall, random entities have no rights, humans have rights but there is no corporate bill of rights. Companies like ISPs enjoy the privilege of commerce and profit in exchange for obligations under law. Persons like you and I enjoy liberites and rights in exchange for obligations under the law. Not only do companies have no right, the fed government has a constitutional right and obligation to regulate interstate commerce as they it fit which ISPs fall squarely in that box.
- tzs 4y ago
  > As I recall, random entities have no rights, humans have rights but there is no corporate bill of rights. The law in the US as early as the late 18th century has recognized that associations of people have rights separate from the rights of the individuals that are in the associations.
  - cma 4y ago
    But definitely not the right to secondary strikes! /s
  - _8j50 4y ago
    Individuals have rights to be part of and participate in a group but legal entities that represent one or multiple people (you can have a corporation with one person) have not been recognized as a person until citizens united ruling and don't have rights. Speech made my people as part of an association or group is protected but speech made by a a person as part of their representation of a legal entity is not their own speech so it isn't protected. Similar to how a government official can censor your speech at their home but they can't censor your speech even at their home as part of their official function since that would be the entity of the government censoring your speech. Throughout the US law there is a clear distinction between people acting on their own behalf or on behalf of some other entity. This is why the president isn't held accountable like a normal person because all of his actions during term are actions of an entity which is his office and therefore not an individual that can be treated equally as other individual persons. At the most basic level, corporations and associations are not naturally existing so they can't have any natural rights, nor can it be claimed that they are a "person", legal or otherwise, because a person can only be a sentient life form which a legal entiry obviously is not. In other words, pets and insects can more reasonably be called a person, even trees and germs, at worst you can extend it to inanimate objects after abandoning all reason but intangible fabrications meant to serve a legal purpose are not persons in the wildest stretch of the imagination.
treis 4y ago
But nobody treats your post as speech by HN or Ycombinator. It's understood that the opinions you express are yours. So there's no expression or speech by HN to trigger 1st amendment protections. IMHO platforms are looking to eat their cake and have it too. When a post is harmful they don't want the liability so they claim they aren't the speaker. But now that they want to ban a post they're trying to claim it's their expression to trigger 1st amendment protections. I don't think Texas' law is a good one for a handful of reasons. But dumb laws aren't the same as unconstitutional laws.
- jquery 4y ago
  So you’re fine if HN gets spammed with low quality memes? Can I go to /r/conservative and tell everyone there why MAGA is just neo-fascism? You want the internet to become a free for all because of your right wing persecution complex?
  - treis 4y ago
    Like I said: I don't think Texas' law is a good one for a handful of reasons. But dumb laws aren't the same as unconstitutional laws.
    - jquery 4y ago
      This seems pretty blatantly unconstitutional. I’d be fine if it added due process for getting banned or something. But it doesn’t, it compels speech. Now HN can no longer ban people for low quality memes or flamebait. Or did the judges write an HN exception into their opinion?
- kevinmchugh 4y ago
  HN has a human moderator who decides what is and isn't in alignment with the HN community. His action to remove posts he finds egregious is his personal expression of speech - he very frequently writes comments explaining why he chose to remove a comment. The act of removing content is itself an expressive act which deserves government protection.
robomartin 4y ago
My non-lawyer perspective is that the issue, in the context of modern realities, has to have an element of scale applied. Two-hundred years ago, nobody could even remotely imagine a business or individual having control of what millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions or billions of people could see or read every day. Even worse, they could not imagine being able to monitor their every reaction with fine granularity to then apply adaptive algorithms. Worse yet, they could not predict the above effectively inserting every member of the audience and entire groups into a Pavlovian operant-conditioning program under the control of those controlling the methods of communication. Clearly the first amendment is not —could not be— designed for this reality. At scale, these companies have more power to influence thought than they should. That much should be clear to any neutral observer. All you have to do is imagine a reality where they favor a side, cause or ideology opposite yours.
- kevinmchugh 4y ago
  The Founders lived in a world where it was much harder to distribute writing. How many printing presses existed in Philadelphia during the drafting of the Constitution? What, in inflation adjusted dollars, was the cost of sending your opinion to anyone who asked for it in 1787? If the biggest local printer didn't like your opinion, what could you do about it?
  - jcranmer 4y ago
    Given the sheer number of pamphlets and broadsheets around that timeframe, there were probably far, far more printers then than you expect. Certainly, "the biggest local printer doesn't like your opinion" doesn't appear to have been an impediment--I have not read any history of Revolutionary-era US without allusion to very vociferous and boisterous debates going on in the print world.
    - kevinmchugh 4y ago
      Independence from Britain was fairly popular by comparison (usually thought to be like 33%) and was well represented amongst the people likely to own a press - that's Ben Franklin, right? How many atheist pamphlets we're printed? How many advocating for legalized, unstigmatized homosexuality or interracial marriage? Perhaps no one held these opinions, but it's hard to say that if the printing of that was suppressed.
rgrieselhuber 4y ago
There seems to be an ongoing confusion in American political discussions that our rights are derived from the Constitution, but this could not be further from the truth. The Founding Fathers made it clear that our rights are granted by God (whatever that means to you) and the Constitution is there to limit the powers of the government. There was much debate about whether the Bill of Rights would cause more harm than good because it would likely (and has been) interpreted as some enumeration of rights, when it was added as a compromise to make it clear to the power-hungry among us that these rights were granted by God and that the government has no right to infringe upon them, even via so-called "public-private partnerships" (a not-so-clever rewording of Mussolini's apocryphal definition of fascism).
- johnchristopher 4y ago
  > There seems to be an ongoing confusion in American political discussions that our rights are derived from the Constitution, but this could not be further from the truth. The Founding Fathers made it clear that our rights are granted by God (whatever that means to you) and the Constitution is there to limit the powers of the government. Does the constitution also references a God or is it only in the declaration of independence ?
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Quick googling seems to indicate no (other than the use of "Year of our Lord," an expression to refer to dates). Apparently all of the state constitutions do, so this was obviously an intentional omission.
  - Kye 4y ago
    Nope. The fact that it doesn't when the people who wrote it had some inkling that one existed always seemed like strong evidence to me that they intended to keep government and church from meddling in each other's affairs. It seems like they always intended for us mere mortals (religious or not, and regardless of religion) to be responsible for figuring out right from wrong and making sure the Constitution reflected that evolving understanding.
  - 4y ago
rayiner 4y ago
I don't think this is great, but I also don't think that's quite what the Court of Appeals said. They distinguished censorship as conduct, not speech. It's not obvious that moderation decisions on websites that allow the public to post content for public consumption are "speech." We analogize to that result by looking at case law that was focused on publishing decisions of newspapers. But what the New York Times chooses to publish is obviously much closer to speech than moderation of user-generated content.

throwoutway 4y ago

Interpreting corporations as “people” IMO was such a misread of the constitution that it’s led to various interpretations here. These are corporations, not people. We need to stop applying people’s rights to corporation and then we’ll return to logical deductions

yasp 4y ago
How do groups of people not have the rights of people?
- woodruffw 4y ago
  They already do, as people.
  - refurb 4y ago
    A group of people together have no right to free speech but individually they do? I don’t see how that could possibly work.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      Who said that? They continue to have rights within the group as well, and they can make whatever group decisions they would like. This doesn’t imply that we need to accept corporate personhood for all purposes.
    - klysm 4y ago
      No this is not what he said. You don’t need to treat the group differently. Since all people have free speech in the group, then the group effectively has free speech as well no?
      - refurb 4y ago
        Right, which is basically what the Supreme Court said. A group of individuals as a corporation still have constitutional rights.
    - Jon_Lowtek 4y ago
      Arguing in favor of making clear legal distinctions between humans and corporations does not automatically imply denying them a right to free speech. It may seem that way when we say: the declaration of human rights does not apply to corporations, because they are inhuman, but we actually argue in favor of a declaration of corporate rights, not against it. The key point is that Corporations are more than just groups of people. But more so we want this distinction because we want an effective Corporate Criminal Law.
    - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
      We give corporations certain legal rights that humans do not have, such as the ability to avoid individual responsibility for corporate crimes or debts. It sort of makes sense that you can't stack rights - you either get to choose your human rights, or your corporate rights (which may have limits that your human rights cannot).
  - yasp 4y ago
    That's a non sequitur.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      You asked: How do people, as groups of people, not have the rights of people? I answered: They do, as people. Nothing about their position in or outside of groups affects that. Where is the non sequitur?
- notservile 4y ago
  Corporations exist as creations of congress and legislated into existence. Congress may not pass laws that seek to silence our ability to speak freely. What you’re suggesting is that because these special entities are run by private individuals and not government employees they’re not effectively bound by the first amendment. Schools exist as creations of legislation as well, but they are run by government employees. Speech cannot be silenced by schools. Your assertion is that since companies, created by legislation, are run by private individuals they can silence speech all day long. The question is, does the 1st amendment apply to government employees or anything borne out of legislation by congress?
- throwoutway 4y ago
  Let me ask you the inverse— should an entire HOA all go to jail if one resident commits a crime? No. It’s not “groups” of people, like you’d find at a concert/meetup/HOA/whatever. If it was, then the whole group should be convicted of crimes everytime the corp ignores a law and commits a crime. But no— different groups exist for different purposes, on paper incorporated under a set of laws. It’s a business, intent on generating profits and many times they break laws. Next time you want a corp to have ”people” rights, consider the inverse to
  - stickfigure 4y ago
    > Let me ask you the inverse— should an entire HOA all go to jail if one resident commits a crime? If all the people in the HOA conspire to commit a crime, using the HOA organization meetings to plan, HOA funds to execute the crime - then yes?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
notservile 4y ago
This is precisely it. Corporations exist as creations of congress and legislation. Can congress and legislation be used to create entities that can then be used to surveil, and curtail our freedom of speech? If so, isn’t congress passing legislation that limits free speech through an intermediary?
krapp 4y ago
The rationale is that corporations are made up of people, and there is no way of denying fundamental rights to corporations without also denying those rights to the people making up and interacting with those corporations. In essence, corporate personhood an argument that rights don't cease to exist when being expressed in aggregate. It also allows certain conveniences, such as being able to sue a corporation as an entity, and corporations being able to enter into contracts as entities, own property, etc.
KerrAvon 4y ago
While I agree that corporations should not be considered people, there’s literally a century of legal precedent built on that faulty interpretation, and the courts are not the appropriate forum to unwind it; it’s too deeply enshrined. Congress must legislate.
- _8j50 4y ago
  Courts can legislate by precedent as well.
  - torpid 4y ago
    Actually, it's considered legislating when stare decisis is abandoned.
- Afforess 4y ago
  Didn't stop the Supreme Court from reverting the Roe v Wade "superprecedent" recently.
- throwoutway 4y ago
  So we can agree that some interpretations are bad/wrong/illogical?
_8j50 4y ago
Thank you! This is what I am saying, treating corporations as people has caused so many problems it might just destroy the whole country! Non-US folks pay attention and make sure this cancer doesn't spread to your country.
- hyperman1 4y ago
  AFAIK this is normal in other countries. In Belgium, we have the distinction between a natural person (a human) and a legal person (might be a corporation), and laws specify the required personhood.
  - _8j50 4y ago
    So too late for Belgium?
throw0101c 4y ago
> Interpreting corporations as “people” IMO was such a misread of the constitution that it’s led to various interpretations here. These are corporations, not people. Corporations have been legal persons for many centuries/millennia: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#History The same principle applies to (professional) societies, communities/municipalities, guilds, unions (locals), universities, etc: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University#History Be curious to know about the legal history of treating legal and natural persons differently.
- throwoutway 4y ago
  I’ve been reading what you linked and I see nowhere that the all the same legal rights of PEOPLE were applied to corporations for millennia. Not sure if you actually found that either? Either way, I’m arguing that it is an unintuitive idea in light of the fact that the Bill of Rights was written with people in mind as the recipients of those rights, and not corporations. If Google suddenly invoked their “right” to bear arms and form well regulated militias, we wouldn’t be swirling our oat milk saying “well they have the right”. I’m arguing they shouldn’t
  - throw0101c 4y ago
    > I’ve been reading what you linked and I see nowhere that the all the same legal rights of PEOPLE were applied to corporations for millennia. Not sure if you actually found that either? Ability to partake in contracts, due process of law, have internal rules of conduct (like having a conscience). Are these not rights that both both 'types of persons' have? > There are therefore two kinds of legal entities: human and non-human. In law, a human person is called a natural person (sometimes also a physical person), and a non-human person is called a juridical person (sometimes also a juridic, juristic, artificial, legal, or fictitious person, Latin: persona ficta). * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_person * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juridical_person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juridical_person IANAL.

gfodor 4y ago

No, the ruling claims the 1st Amendment is irrelevant in determining the regulation of censorship because censoring speech is not speech. They go on to claim the 1st Amendment has a role to play in determining permissible restrictions on corporate censorship since such censorship can lead to a chilling effect on public speech. But they reject entirely the premise that forcing companies to platform speech is a form of regulating corporate speech. I'm not going to comment on that conclusion, but your comment is a complete mis-frame of the argument, at least by my reading.

jcranmer 4y ago
> No, the ruling claims the 1st Amendment is irrelevant in determining the regulation of censorship because censoring speech is not speech. This flies in the face of ample SCOTUS precedent--which the 5th Circuit is obliged to follow--that the 1st Amendment also provides a freedom from compelled speech as well as freedom of association.
- dannyw 4y ago
  Common carrier laws are the exception, however. Arguably, the big tech platforms of today have more power and influence over the public square, than ISPs did in the past. It's very possible for two reasonable people to come to the opposite conclusions about whether the act is constitutional.
- gfodor 4y ago
  Well good news, odds are SCOTUS will clarify.
- tarakat 4y ago
  SCOTUS also ruled that the 1st Amendment allows compelling a mall (a private entity) to host petitioners, which is strikingly similar to this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._Robins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R... And we were happy to throw freedom of association under the bus to enforce civil rights.
  - 4y ago

_8j50 4y ago

Hold on there! "Private entity"? As I recall, random entities have no rights, humans have rights but there is no corporate bill of rights. Companies like ISPs enjoy the privilege of commerce and profit in exchange for obligations under law. Persons like you and I enjoy liberites and rights in exchange for obligations under the law. Not only do companies have no right, the fed government has a constitutional right and obligation to regulate interstate commerce as they it fit which ISPs fall squarely in that box.

tzs 4y ago
> As I recall, random entities have no rights, humans have rights but there is no corporate bill of rights. The law in the US as early as the late 18th century has recognized that associations of people have rights separate from the rights of the individuals that are in the associations.
- cma 4y ago
  But definitely not the right to secondary strikes! /s
- _8j50 4y ago
  Individuals have rights to be part of and participate in a group but legal entities that represent one or multiple people (you can have a corporation with one person) have not been recognized as a person until citizens united ruling and don't have rights. Speech made my people as part of an association or group is protected but speech made by a a person as part of their representation of a legal entity is not their own speech so it isn't protected. Similar to how a government official can censor your speech at their home but they can't censor your speech even at their home as part of their official function since that would be the entity of the government censoring your speech. Throughout the US law there is a clear distinction between people acting on their own behalf or on behalf of some other entity. This is why the president isn't held accountable like a normal person because all of his actions during term are actions of an entity which is his office and therefore not an individual that can be treated equally as other individual persons. At the most basic level, corporations and associations are not naturally existing so they can't have any natural rights, nor can it be claimed that they are a "person", legal or otherwise, because a person can only be a sentient life form which a legal entiry obviously is not. In other words, pets and insects can more reasonably be called a person, even trees and germs, at worst you can extend it to inanimate objects after abandoning all reason but intangible fabrications meant to serve a legal purpose are not persons in the wildest stretch of the imagination.

treis 4y ago

But nobody treats your post as speech by HN or Ycombinator. It's understood that the opinions you express are yours. So there's no expression or speech by HN to trigger 1st amendment protections. IMHO platforms are looking to eat their cake and have it too. When a post is harmful they don't want the liability so they claim they aren't the speaker. But now that they want to ban a post they're trying to claim it's their expression to trigger 1st amendment protections. I don't think Texas' law is a good one for a handful of reasons. But dumb laws aren't the same as unconstitutional laws.

jquery 4y ago
So you’re fine if HN gets spammed with low quality memes? Can I go to /r/conservative and tell everyone there why MAGA is just neo-fascism? You want the internet to become a free for all because of your right wing persecution complex?
- treis 4y ago
  Like I said: I don't think Texas' law is a good one for a handful of reasons. But dumb laws aren't the same as unconstitutional laws.
  - jquery 4y ago
    This seems pretty blatantly unconstitutional. I’d be fine if it added due process for getting banned or something. But it doesn’t, it compels speech. Now HN can no longer ban people for low quality memes or flamebait. Or did the judges write an HN exception into their opinion?
kevinmchugh 4y ago
HN has a human moderator who decides what is and isn't in alignment with the HN community. His action to remove posts he finds egregious is his personal expression of speech - he very frequently writes comments explaining why he chose to remove a comment. The act of removing content is itself an expressive act which deserves government protection.

robomartin 4y ago

My non-lawyer perspective is that the issue, in the context of modern realities, has to have an element of scale applied. Two-hundred years ago, nobody could even remotely imagine a business or individual having control of what millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions or billions of people could see or read every day. Even worse, they could not imagine being able to monitor their every reaction with fine granularity to then apply adaptive algorithms. Worse yet, they could not predict the above effectively inserting every member of the audience and entire groups into a Pavlovian operant-conditioning program under the control of those controlling the methods of communication. Clearly the first amendment is not —could not be— designed for this reality. At scale, these companies have more power to influence thought than they should. That much should be clear to any neutral observer. All you have to do is imagine a reality where they favor a side, cause or ideology opposite yours.

kevinmchugh 4y ago
The Founders lived in a world where it was much harder to distribute writing. How many printing presses existed in Philadelphia during the drafting of the Constitution? What, in inflation adjusted dollars, was the cost of sending your opinion to anyone who asked for it in 1787? If the biggest local printer didn't like your opinion, what could you do about it?
- jcranmer 4y ago
  Given the sheer number of pamphlets and broadsheets around that timeframe, there were probably far, far more printers then than you expect. Certainly, "the biggest local printer doesn't like your opinion" doesn't appear to have been an impediment--I have not read any history of Revolutionary-era US without allusion to very vociferous and boisterous debates going on in the print world.
  - kevinmchugh 4y ago
    Independence from Britain was fairly popular by comparison (usually thought to be like 33%) and was well represented amongst the people likely to own a press - that's Ben Franklin, right? How many atheist pamphlets we're printed? How many advocating for legalized, unstigmatized homosexuality or interracial marriage? Perhaps no one held these opinions, but it's hard to say that if the printing of that was suppressed.

rgrieselhuber 4y ago

There seems to be an ongoing confusion in American political discussions that our rights are derived from the Constitution, but this could not be further from the truth. The Founding Fathers made it clear that our rights are granted by God (whatever that means to you) and the Constitution is there to limit the powers of the government. There was much debate about whether the Bill of Rights would cause more harm than good because it would likely (and has been) interpreted as some enumeration of rights, when it was added as a compromise to make it clear to the power-hungry among us that these rights were granted by God and that the government has no right to infringe upon them, even via so-called "public-private partnerships" (a not-so-clever rewording of Mussolini's apocryphal definition of fascism).

johnchristopher 4y ago
> There seems to be an ongoing confusion in American political discussions that our rights are derived from the Constitution, but this could not be further from the truth. The Founding Fathers made it clear that our rights are granted by God (whatever that means to you) and the Constitution is there to limit the powers of the government. Does the constitution also references a God or is it only in the declaration of independence ?
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Quick googling seems to indicate no (other than the use of "Year of our Lord," an expression to refer to dates). Apparently all of the state constitutions do, so this was obviously an intentional omission.
- Kye 4y ago
  Nope. The fact that it doesn't when the people who wrote it had some inkling that one existed always seemed like strong evidence to me that they intended to keep government and church from meddling in each other's affairs. It seems like they always intended for us mere mortals (religious or not, and regardless of religion) to be responsible for figuring out right from wrong and making sure the Constitution reflected that evolving understanding.
- 4y ago

rayiner 4y ago

I don't think this is great, but I also don't think that's quite what the Court of Appeals said. They distinguished censorship as conduct, not speech. It's not obvious that moderation decisions on websites that allow the public to post content for public consumption are "speech." We analogize to that result by looking at case law that was focused on publishing decisions of newspapers. But what the New York Times chooses to publish is obviously much closer to speech than moderation of user-generated content.