The "private company" argument, while fully and technically correct, is such a ridiculous canard to trot out at a time when we slide rapidly into public-private authoritarianism.

Someone (probably), in 1934 Hacker News: "BASF, Deutsche Bank, Hugo Boss, Bayer, BMW, and Siemens are private merchants. They can choose what to sell, and to whom. Maybe this presents a survival problem for the Jews, we don't know."

I guess it's ok since the public-private authoritarianism and book-burning is left-leaning this time?

I don't consider internet company cancellation authoritarian because they're just following the will of the market. It's a symptom, not the cause. If it were solely up to Ebay execs, they would rather people not be overly sensitive because they can make more money that way.

The same is true for content platforms like Reddit or Facebook. They were pro-free speech until they started to get bad publicity from it.

But market doesn't care about this, it's just some tiny group of insanely vocal people

The insanely vocal people will twist the narrative to convince the regular people to go on a morale crusade. The Youtube adpocalypse started because a journalist kept watching Isis videos before they got removed, until they found one with a Coca cola ad.

Conservatives wouldn't complain if private companies were censoring and cancelling left-leaning content. They'd be out there defending private property rights and corporate freedom to act. It's transparently political.

BTW: I don't think canceling left-leaning stuff is far fetched. If you think we have cancel culture now, wait until we have a serious "rebooted" labor movement in this country that starts getting traction. The gloves will come off.

Left-leaning stuff has been cancelled for ages. Try organizing a union in your workplace and see how quickly you'll get cancelled.

> Conservatives wouldn't complain if private companies were censoring and cancelling left-leaning content. They'd be out there defending private property rights and corporate freedom to act. It's transparently political.

I think you are confusing two very different things.

Criticizing Ebay for banning particular books, or AWS for dropping Parlor, or Twitter for banning various conservatives is not in contradiction with the libertarian/conservative idea that private entities should have the freedom to manage their business as they see fit.

Arguing for limited government oversight/power in these situations is orthogonal to criticizing the decisions on their own merits.

It's not in contradiction provided you don't encourage people to storm government buildings on the basis of private entities making their own choices. Which did happen.

What are you getting at? This comment seems to be unrelated to anything I'm saying even if I could understand it.

And for what it is worth the capitol rioters have been widely condemned by libertarians and conservatives.

Simply that Don Jr criticizing Dr Seuss or eBay for canning books is contradictory to lib/con views on free speech when his base uses such arguments to violently rebel against the government.

Bill Maher made this point, that Republicans have lately tried to appropriate "cancel culture" for being correctly rebuked, while what happens to people with his views is insane. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmXTUSP9a9M

Edit: Am I incorrect?

I always go into Maher from these recommendations thinking maybe I'll like his point here. Then halfway through I realize I've been duped again. In this case he laments republicans appropriating the term cancel culture, which he insists is a big deal for other reasons. Then at 4:15 he laughs while sarcastically saying "it's always okay when Trump's the nazi" and I'm like, oh okay. I remember how you like to draw people farther to the right while appearing as if you're anti-alt-right.

I think Maher is what the GP commenter would refer to as "transparently political" if he were on another side.

Yes of course the show is politically biased I just think his supposed thesis does not match the conclusions he draws. It is misleading that he presents himself as a centrist while laughing at those who would criticize the alt right.

Perhaps his thing is he just wants to criticize everyone and get away with it and if that's the case then I don't get what he stands for. Might be how I feel about conservatism in general which increasingly seems to be just anti-everything that would impose rules on the wealthy.

> The "private company" argument, while fully and technically correct, is such a ridiculous canard to trot out at a time when we slide rapidly into public-private authoritarianism

So make a company yourself that specializes in trading items banned from other shops. It wouldn't be the first and it's completely legal. I bet someone is already capitalizing on the outrage over this news. I don't know how exactly and I don't mean the media.

About the companies you list, we study them to look at the rise of Hitler, and we have put anti-discrimination laws in place to hopefully stop someone from abusing their positions like that again.

This isn't the state entering your home and burning books. Wrong hill.

How will you make your business when your banks are cancelling you ?

If you make a website selling used Seuss books and your bank cancels you I'll support you.

If you make a social media site that organizes domestic terror and your bank cancels you then that's your problem.

"If you make a social media site that organises domestic terror"

You do realise that most of the organisation of the "domestic terror" was done on Facebook right ?

How about making a website selling banned, unpopular or borderline racist literature? And then payment providers cancel services to it. Can I then take orders using cash via letters? Seems like it can work. Hopefully the post office, Fedex and UPS and other mail carriers don't notice and cancel it for some obscure money-laundering law/regulation about mailing money! Must I maybe resort to selling that literature on the street corner, back alley maybe?

What you describe occurs in China with books that might criticize their government, only they can't even sell them in back alleys. I've never heard of it happening with any material in the US short of things that encourage acts of terror. And I think that is the right place to draw the line.

> Ebay is a private merchant

That doesn't mean their choices are somehow immune from public criticism.

I realize that clarity is in short supply in online discussions, but mostly I think people that are reacting negatively are just asserting that they disagree with the decision and not that a law has been broken or that the government should step in and force the decision to be reversed.

I respond with this because the people who just stormed the capitol were egged on by those claiming disenfranchisement in public and private sectors. I feel it's important to make the distinction, just as it was to point out there was not widespread voter fraud.

Maybe a year or two ago I would have completely agreed with the public vs private argument, but the pace of change has clearly accelerated, and when private institutions can easily have just as much impact with their decisions as public institutions, the lines blur.

From first principles, the public vs private division is about preserving freedom. When a private company can exercise its freedom to infringe on the freedom of others to such an extent, we act. Private businesses can’t do a lot of things because they harm freedoms (civil rights act and its additions among others).

Comcast is a private company, they can choose what sites to allow. Maybe this is a problem with HN.

Colorado Power is a private company, they can choose who to sell power to. Maybe this is a problem with that data center.

They can't choose based on current FCC policy. Private companies have choice within regulations, and that's a good thing for consumers. Everyone needs to play by the same rules and the big players don't get to take advantage of their positions as much.

No one fails to make this "hey, it's a private company" point in these discussions. It's always brought up when someone is criticizing a tech behemoth for censorship of some kind, and it's nearly always a non-sequitur.

Guess what? It's totally fine and valid to criticize private entities even when their conduct is perfectly lawful.

Thought experiment: imagine eBay and Amazon started to promote Neo-Nazi literature on their home pages in the same way that they now promote anti-racist books and such. What would be the appropriate response: outrage, or "bUt iTs a pRiVaTe cOmPaNy!!!"?

Insert that picture of a person being stepped on with the text "At least its not the government"

At what point to we step up and say, these megacorps have as much power over our lives as the government. And in some cases more. The US government would struggle to ban a book world wide but ebay and amazon can do it pretty easily.

I agree there are monopolies that need antitrust attention. Wish we'd focus on the ISP infrastructure. Regional broadband ISP monopolies are the problem underlying the big tech social media and advertising companies. Yelling at eBay for banning Dr Seuss books is a distraction from that and I believe that may be the intent. We haven't been able to discuss net neutrality for a few years because of this tabloid style of news. Let's get back to business.

These companies don't have the legal means to put your body in a cage, end your life or take you into custody by force until you answer to their accusations like a government does. That's why comparing this to government jackboots is a very weak argument.

They also don’t have the legal means to bar black people from service - because we changed the laws to prevent them from acting evily. “At least they can’t kill you” isn’t a good argument.

It does feel a bit analogous to criticizing religion, as though somehow a group of people or set of ideas can be exempt from disagreement.

More analogous to saying if you don't like one religion you're free to try another.

I don't expect eBay to cater to my banned Dr Seuss book needs.

I guess, maybe, but that's untrue for a tremendous amount of people, and is that a sentiment that you'd expect me to get behind?

You think it's untrue that a lot of people want freedom of religion? I don't follow.

I feel like we're both reading each other's comments in a completely different way than intended. I think it's not unreasonable to suggest that many people globally don't want freedom of religion, but I was saying that many people currently don't have the freedom to leave theirs, whether legally or for other reasons.

> many people globally don't want freedom of religion

Are you saying they don't want freedom of religion because they are happy with no religion or are happy with theirs? That may be true for folks who've never experienced anything different from the way they were raised. I think the majority would like the freedom to choose something different when one thing is not working for them.

More on point:

Back in the 1950s, Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, decided that he wasn't going to buy any more screenplays from communists, or anybody who had communist friends, or even anybody who'd been accused of having communist friends.

MGM was a private company, so that was perfectly okay.

Right?

Right?

...Yes? It seems like the head of a private company should be able to decide how to spend money based on whatever reasoning they want, within the limits of the law. Are you suggesting there should be a law that would have prohibited this behavior somehow? Or just that it was morally wrong?

I'm saying that the Hollywood Blacklist is pretty much universally considered to have been a Bad Thing nowadays, even though, yes, it was perfectly legal.

It's also a suggestion that perhaps one might want to think about what could happen should the "cancellation" shoe suddenly be on the other foot, as it well might. These things can change, sometimes faster than people expect them to.

Robespierre was pretty surprised when the mob showed up at his door, you can bet.

On re-reading the parent comment above yours, I see they were referring to criticizing things done by private companies that are technically lawful, so that's my bad for not seeing the full context. Legality and morality often get conflated in these sorts of threads so I just wanted to clarify. Although I don't really agree with either the choices behind the Hollywood Blacklist or this current Ebay banning, I believe they should both be able to happen in a free(ish) market.

Personally, I think the cancel culture stuff will hit a tipping point and go the other way toward some mean. That sort of pendulum swing happens with culture all the time. Just like our society and laws survived the Hollywood Blacklist (and many worse societal upheavals), it'll survive this.

Someone could use a history lesson..

Both.

People just stormed the capitol. It seems appropriate to remind the difference between public and private censorship given those who incited it are amplifying this idea that we're being disenfranchised in both the public and private sectors.