Re:YouTube suspends Donald Trump's channel
by ben_w on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @06:20AM
(#25760700)
Should a president be allowed greater freedom of speech than a normal person?
These companies have been censoring certain groups for ages. One of my exes who self-identifies as an anarcho-Communist has been angry with what she sees a Facebook’s anti-left political censorship for at least seven years; and if you see her censorship as justified given her politics, there’s also stuff like this: https://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/3936987.html
People have been begging for these companies to censor threats of violence for ages (meme is something like “Twitter: What changes would you like? Users: Remove the Nazis; Twitter: Timeline now scrolls sideways, likes are now called florps”)
The consensus response until now has been that corporations are private and have the right to kick off whoever they want. When I have suggested that their power to do so needed to be constrained the way governments are and for similar reasons, I got a lot of flack for it.
That said, I don’t have the American attitude to freedom of speech as an end in itself, rather I value it as an instrumental goal, so I’m a lot more comfortable with some censorship than many people on Hacker News, even though I still want as little as possible. As little as possible just isn’t “none” in my opinion.
These companies have been censoring certain groups for ages. One of my exes who self-identifies as an anarcho-Communist has been angry with what she sees a Facebook’s anti-left political censorship for at least seven years; and if you see her censorship as justified given her politics, there’s also stuff like this: https://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/3936987.html
People have been begging for these companies to censor threats of violence for ages (meme is something like “Twitter: What changes would you like? Users: Remove the Nazis; Twitter: Timeline now scrolls sideways, likes are now called florps”)
The consensus response until now has been that corporations are private and have the right to kick off whoever they want. When I have suggested that their power to do so needed to be constrained the way governments are and for similar reasons, I got a lot of flack for it.
That said, I don’t have the American attitude to freedom of speech as an end in itself, rather I value it as an instrumental goal, so I’m a lot more comfortable with some censorship than many people on Hacker News, even though I still want as little as possible. As little as possible just isn’t “none” in my opinion.