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What was the old rallying call? It's their platform they can moderate their content at their pleasure. "When companies do it, it's not censorship" ...etc...

• gjsman-1000 4y ago
  The 1st Amendment does not cover the private actions of companies. Of course... that doesn't change that on both sides, it will be used. "This violates the first amendment, they are censoring misinformation!" "This violates the first amendment, they are censoring n00dz!" "The first amendment doesn't require them to put up with misinformation!" "The first amendment doesn't require them to censor n00dz!" And so on... However, I will say, right now, that I find it interesting that the Hacker News hivemind in general is more sympathetic to the censorship of misinformation, than it is to the censorship of certain images. In which case, is it just a values judgement?
  • hn92726819 4y ago
    > The 1st Amendment does not cover the private actions of companies This is exactly the statement the comment you replied to is criticizing. It keeps getting repeated in the wrong places, like here in this comment thread. There's free speech, U.S. Constitution amendment 1, and there's free speech as an idea. I'd wager when people complain about lack of free speech, they are more concerned about the idea rather than the amendment. I think most people here know that amendment 1 relates only to the government, so it's unhelpful and unrelated to even bring up the first amendment. Edit: of course, you're right that anyone complaining about lack of amendment 1 in this situation doesn't make sense, but note that's not the same as people complaining about a lack of free speech.
    • Joker_vD 4y ago
      The 1st amendment was written at a very specific time back when the governments were the biggest oppressors, and the megacorporations of modern kind didn't exist; so it has protections against historically well-known and well-understood state censorship but not against not yet existing corporate censorship.
      • tbrownaw 4y ago
        It's part of what's more-or-less the design document for the federal government. So of course it doesn't talk about behavior of non-government entities. Not because that's not important, but because it's off-topic and out of scope.
      • nullc 4y ago
        The government is the ultimate monopoly, you have no alternatives to it. Some things have changed but that hasn't. Instead of the first amendment being somehow applied to private actors (really dicey because doing that would violate _their_ first amendment rights!) perhaps what you should want instead is the re-fanging of antitrust?
  • mc32 4y ago
    Indeed the problems is people want freedom of speech for the speech they agree with. So, in this case, images. But because they disagree with anti-lockdowners or anti-vaxxers or whatever --they don't agree with those argument for free speech.
  • junofan 4y ago
    First amendment doesn’t cover obscenity. And it applies to private companies when they operate functions traditionally performed by the government.
    • LorenPechtel 4y ago
      I see nothing in the First about obscenity. That's just one of the things the puritans have managed to get away with circumventing the Constitution. It's also a pretty meaningless term.
      • _-david-_ 4y ago
        This is no different than treason, hiring a hitman, fraud or libel. The founders did not consider any of those to be free speech as well. Everybody at the time understood obscenity was not protected so there was no need to explicitly call it out as an exception.
  • vikingerik 4y ago
    The legal concept regarding freedom of speech as in the First Amendment only applies to governments, yes. But the moral ideal of freedom of speech is for everyone, and individuals and organizations can support and espouse it or censor and suppress it. We need a concept to distinguish these, like "free as in legal" versus "free as in voice". As for the argument that freedom of speech doesn't apply to misinformation or danger or obscenity or whatever -- that just creates an arms race to declare everything you don't like as misinformation or dangerous or obscenity. You combat such things in the open market of ideas and exchange, not by censorship. That's just might-makes-right.