We don't have to fling to one extreme or the other. There is a moderate position here. And remember, this is about the importance of free speech as a social principle. If we don't cherish our rights, they'll vanish. I'm not necessarily advocating any specific legal changes.

HN is a boutique site that targets a specific niche. I would guess it has a few thousand active users. It's developed and designed specifically to facilitate discussion on issues that fit its niche and target audience.

Facebook, Twitter, et al, on the other hand, are platforms that function much like public utilities. They are used by the masses to disseminate speech of all kinds. They target a generic user base and suggest that they can all use the site to follow their individual interests.

Beyond the mere target audience of "everyone", Facebook and Google have massive amounts of control. The penetration of Google and Facebook is probably almost exactly equal with the penetration of internet service (and to some extent, both have projects that take them beyond that sphere). If you use the internet, the likelihood is that significant amounts of your usage are under the direct control of these corporations.

Facebook boasts over 1 billion daily active users. That is 1/8 of the earth's population. That is MASSIVE -- far further reaching than any monopoly in the pre-internet age. Facebook is also the platform that people depend on most heavily for self-expression. It's a central hub that many people visit multiple times each day; some groups and businesses are now run entirely out of Facebook. Functionally, it is not unlike the pre-internet public square, and it's a frequent crossroads for almost all internet users. As with past public squares, it's possible to avoid it if you're trying really hard, but you essentially have to be a digital recluse.

This applies similarly to Google for search, email, and mobile.

As such, it's scary when such powerful platforms that present with such generic mission statements and see such widespread adoption start erasing political speech because they deem it "offensive" at the corporate level.

That is a ridiculous amount of control, and it's something we've never experienced before. Even the broadcasters of the 20th century were limited by the reach of radio waves to specific metros, and they usually had several easily accessible competitors (that people would actually use, unlike FB's direct competitors). We used to worry about the large influence of these people so much that it was illegal to own more than a certain number of major media outlets in the same market (that restriction was removed in 2003, IIRC). [We also used to have the Fairness Doctrine to compel broadcasters to accurately present both sides of the political issues.]

People recognized the damage to the public square posed by moving the discussion off to corporate-controlled broadcast media and wanted a way to check the power of the broadcasters. We seem to have forgotten about that risk, just at the moment when the central control of a small handful of people is most potent.

Imagine that printing press manufacturers had the ability to stop press owners from setting certain things to the page. That reflects the reality of the publishing mediums we depend on today. That should be worrisome.

I'm stopping short of suggesting a legal solution, but just speaking to this as an important social principle, we should all be disgusted with the conduct from the major online platform providers. Such general, widely-used platforms are betraying the public and our principles and values in favor of open dialogue by working to distort the landscape of public opinion and curtail the speech of the political, philosophical, or moral enemies of the corporate overlords.

Google has used page rank from the very beginning to show popular pages. Since then, there have been a zillion other teaks to search ranking. (Not to mention that Gmail's spam filtering was an attractive early feature.)

Facebook started out excluding people who didn't go to a particular college, and later, the friend graph helped people avoid communication with strangers.

More recently, Snapchat showed that auto-deletion of photos is something people really like, even if it's technically "impossible" to do perfectly securely.

So it's not just about big companies being in control. Filtering is a really popular feature. Companies that did it well attracted users and became big.

The issue that demonstrates the loss of free speech as a social value is that a large number of people enthusiastically pursue and endorse the censorship of legitimate political discourse on the networks that have general applicability and have become the de-facto publication platforms of the modern world.

Facebook, Twitter, et al are not really networks by themselves, at least not in most respects; they're platforms for networks. You use them to build your own communities; communities of your friends, family, businesses, etc. The platforms don't present with any ideology because they present as applicable to every ideology. If they're going to make such representations, it's not unreasonable to expect them to adhere to them with some consistency.

Additionally, when 1/8 of the world's population depends on Facebook for its news and information, and Facebook presents itself as a place that's appropriate for all users, I think it is completely legitimate to hold them to a reasonably strict standard of fairness. Regardless of the legal situation, we can and should be doing this socially.

If we enshrine free speech as a social value, we should all be concerned when good-faith political discussions are removed from these platforms, no matter how repugnant we find the actual views expressed. All views must be allowed to compete on the marketplace of ideas. Forcing legitimate policy positions into hushed tones only builds a tension that leads to a violent snap.

The core question is whether Facebook, Google, et al have reached a level where their corporate-enforced censorship policies have a real effect on the aggregate political dialogue. I think that it's undeniable that they do at this point.

I feel this paragraph goes to the heart of your argument so I'd like to dissect it a bit.

Enshrining free speech as a social value is essentially arbitrary, and that's fine - because values are what we really care about and choose to establish the rest of our utility criteria.

But having adopted free speech as a value, it does not follow that all speech must then be upheld. It's interesting that you use the phrase 'good-faith political discussions' here, because that has significant ramifications for judging what we find repugnant.

Let's suppose for a moment that I really can't stand people in the XYZ group. Under the doctrine of free speech, I might write all kinds of things to promulgate my opinions, from asserting that the XYZs are boring and stupid, to opining that XYZ people are going to hell, and so on.

But what if I say that XYZ people shouldn't be allowed to post on the internet? Well now I'm not upholding free speech any more, in fact I'd be asserting an intention to deny it to one group of whom I don't approve. Am I really discussing my views in good faith in that case? What if I say they should be killed? OK that doesn't go directly to free speech, but since it's impossible for people express themselves freely if they're not alive I'm certainly limiting their free speech indirectly.

What I'm arguing here is that there's a qualitative difference between my saying 'I think you are bad (in some way) and I dislike you' and calling for people to have their rights curtailed because they occupy a category that I find repugnant. In the first case I'm expressing my emotional hostility, but in the second case I'm making a positive proposal that their freedoms should be reduced relative to mine.

I'm quite opposed to fascism and similar authoritarian ideologies, and lately I keep running into people who raise this free speech argument, and ask if I am not being worse than the fascists myself for arguing that their views should be driven out of mainstream discourse and marginalized or shut down as efficiently as possible.

But to mind mind, people who espouse such authoritarian ideologies are not arguing in good faith. They're not saying things like 'it's so bad that [this group] won't sign onto my ideology, oh well live and let live.' They're saying things like '[this group] is morally/ culturally/ physically deficient and should not be allowed to participate in society, or maybe even in life.'

To put it in a single sentence, I do not feel inclined inclined to defend the liberty interests of those who have expressed an intention to do harm to me - not necessarily me personally, but because of my membership in various social categories of which they disapprove. To use historical examples, it's not like if some Jews went to Nazi rallies thy were welcomed with open arms as converts to some new intellectual current; their Jewishness (or membership in some other 'degenerate' category) made them ineligible to participate in the Nazi project.

I fail to see how you can justify giving free speech protections to those who make no secret of their desire to limit other people's liberties. I don't hate Richard Spencer because he's white, male, and has a particular haircut, I hate the fact that he's actively exhorting people to join him in a project get rid of people who are not white enough.

I'm a-OK with people punching Richard Spencer precisely because he has dedicated himself for the last several years to promoting a narrow and aggressive policy of racial supremacy that includes reducing the liberty of others by killing them or driving them out of their homes. If he were to popup in public tomorrow and announce that he'd renounced fascism and that people should be judged on the quality of their behavior towards others then I would no longer support people punching him as randomly and as often as possible. But while he's advocating systemic violence against others, he is not to my mind arguing in good faith because he is not willing to uphold that free speech principle for everyone else.

The other argument I hear from some people is 'well the solution to hate speech is more speech.' That's bullshit spoken by people who don't actually know what it's like to feel that their safety is at risk. Obviously I don't reach to interfere with someone's free speech every time I hear something I dislike - a person might be crazy or just angry and offensive by announcing the fact of their prejudice or suchlike, and in most cases they're best refuted, mocked, or ignored.

but where someone is knowingly and systematically arguing [out-group] are inherently terrible people - not the same thing as saying that people in [group] have inherently terrible ideas - then I'm not willing to guard a place on the platform for those who are using that position to push others off the platform. I simply do not owe anything to people who are actively promoting harm against others.

I hope it's clear that I'm not trying to invalidate your position so much as to more fully define my own.

This is a bad characterisation; it was much easier to ignore stuff you didn't like before the internet. The internet is also not to blame for politics - while it helped intensify things, it wasn't the 'safe spaces' that gave you Trump, but the hysterical fearmongering that the conservatives had been doing for almost a decade beforehand.

I'm not sure how you think people were 'forced' to see views they didn't like before the internet.

Some types of public demonstrations or forums require permits and the like, but the public square is still available to anyone with a point to make, and if you're in the same physical area/space, you're going to see it, like it or not.

As the bulk of our discussion offloads from public spaces or common community gathering places to curated digital gardens where no one knows the difference if you unfollow their feed, we lose the forces that make it difficult to ignore each other. That makes it much easier to stay closed-minded.

You say it's easier to remain close-minded, yet we are in a prosperous time with greater freedom across the board for all. Try being a minority fifty years ago, and see if you still think that people were more open-minded back then.

I wouldn't necessarily characterize what I was discussing as fraternization, but no, I don't think that's bizarre at all when compared against today's culture of sitting indoors looking at a screen bare minimum of 8 hours per day.

>Similarly, the advent of the internet doesn't mean that people no longer interact physically.

Obviously, this is not absolute. But it is seriously limited. If you wanted to have an active discussion of policy issues, what were your options pre-internet? Three-way calling (I think this came out in the 90s anyway)? You could write letters and stuff but that's quite the lag time. Serious discussion that kept human attention spans engaged had to happen in person.

>You say it's easier to remain close-minded, yet we are in a prosperous time with greater freedom across the board for all.

First, are these necessarily mutually exclusive? Second, isn't this discussion specifically about how our freedoms are jeopardized by the closed-mindedness that arises from cultural disregard for the social principle and value of free speech?

>Try being a minority fifty years ago, and see if you still think that people were more open-minded back then.

I'm not saying that people were more open-minded in an absolute sense, though I think it's easy to say that the mainstream political discourse was more civil. I'm saying that the way technology and telecommunication has changed our interaction is causing us to lose regard for the principles of free speech and open dialogue.

You seem to be reading this from a very narrow perspective that's not ultimately relevant to the discussion at hand.

You only need to go back a few decades to get to a point where you could simply handwave away an opinion because the speaker was black or a woman. You can't get much more contemptuous of free speech than just ignoring someone out of hand. Your 'principles' don't exist in the actual past; they're a fantasy world that has never existed.

Even the idea that 'you can't bypass the public square' is simply not true, neither physically nor philosphically. Cities have been divided along class lines since forever, with little in the way of mixing. Even in a small town, it's not like you had to go to the square.

> You seem to be reading this from a very narrow perspective that's not ultimately relevant to the discussion at hand.

You're saying technology is holding us back, I'm arguing it's not. But it's nice that you bemoan the lack of communication, then try this dismissal. So much for 'open dialogue'...

No, as I said, you're reading this from a very narrow perspective. Free speech is NOT about whether we choose to ignore someone. It's about whether we allow them to speak at all. In fact, choosing to ignore someone is the option consistent with free speech.

Today, instead of just ignoring content we dislike, we see publishing platforms cutting off the audience when the statements don't comply with their corporate agendas, and we have a bunch of self-righteous people approving of it, as long as the targeted people are not on their side.

That's the social value we are losing. Everyone should be concerned that real political speech is being suppressed, even if it's not happening to their side. Instead, people are actively encouraging it.

Because we no longer hold most of our political discourse in physical rooms where it's much harder to simply dismiss or ignore someone who is also present, and because we no longer have to go across an open area where anyone is able to distribute their content or peddle their ideas, the internet is contributing to the rise of a generation that has no idea how to disagree civilly.

>Even the idea that 'you can't bypass the public square' is simply not true, neither physically nor philosphically. Cities have been divided along class lines since forever, with little in the way of mixing. Even in a small town, it's not like you had to go to the square.

You're thinking too literally; I'm not referring to an actual square/hub. I'm referring to public space, where signage can be placed by anyone, where people can stand on the sidewalk and give out their fliers to people who aren't looking for them, they can get permits from the city and do a march on a public street, etc. The surrounding people can't just make these things go away by pressing "Hide". That's the point I'm making.

While these things are still possible, our reliance on the internet for socialization, shopping, work, and a lot of things that we used to have to go out into public space to do has limited the applicability and, I believe, has seriously contributed to a decline in civility/understanding. I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree on that because I don't see you providing any actual points to discuss.

>You're saying technology is holding us back, I'm arguing it's not.

You're not talking about technology at all. You're saying that more people have civil rights today, ergo everyone is more open and enlightened. I don't think this necessarily follows. You haven't discussed how technology actually impacts our dialogue at all, as far as I recall.

>But it's nice that you bemoan the lack of communication, then try this dismissal. So much for 'open dialogue'...

It's not a dismissal, first. It's my opinion. I think that you're reading it from a narrow perspective that's not really relevant, which I've discussed in more detail here. How is that invalid commentary?

And yes, "open dialogue" includes people saying they don't think your argument is working or that your perspective is narrow. That's a very important part of it, in fact, and that's the point I'm making here. People today are used to dismissing those they don't agree with and moving on because the internet makes it really easy, and then it makes it easy to go find more people who will just keep feeding you whatever you want to hear, validating your opinions.

So, to be perfectly clear, this dialogue is still open, and nothing about this betrays any values related to free speech or open dialogue. I'm not trying to get HN to block your comments because I disagree with them. I'm not trying to get you ostracized or punished for disagreeing. I wouldn't be supportive if your comments were blocked. I'm not sure what else to say about the topic at hand, but if I can think of something worthwhile I'd be happy to offer it.

All of this sounds like an open dialogue to me. Open dialogue doesn't mean that people will agree or that you will be in an echo chamber. It just recognizes the importance of real, substantive political discussion, which includes allowing people to blatantly say they think we're wrong, and that people shouldn't be punished for their good faith efforts to pursue a dialogue, no matter how seriously we disagree.

I think the fact that I need to explain this means that technology is keeping us too isolated. We don't have enough experience having discussions with people we don't agree with, and learning to work and sympathize with them. I do posit that pre-internet, this isolation was less severe. I know you keep mentioning class and racial divides, which are totally legitimate issues, but they're not directly related to the problem of political hegemony; people in the same classes and races can and do disagree.