> Do you want the government deciding what is acceptable?

Yes. Entire world except the US does. People elect parliaments, who make laws according to their voters' agendas. Then the laws are enforced. What's acceptable and what's not acceptable are decided in the same manner. Like how going out naked in any city in the civilized world constitutes an offense unless you have a mental disorder.

You already obey with a zillion of things in which 'the government' decides to be acceptable or not acceptable.

I mean, sure. But there’s a reason this stuff was invented in the US and not elsewhere.

I want everyone to think about how increasing the difficulty in moderation will affect all your favorite forums/platforms, including HN.

And if you think these laws can be written so they easily apply only to “the big ones”, or that it will stop there, you are being naive. Government will always take a mile if you give them an inch.

> But there’s a reason this stuff was invented in the US and not elsewhere.

And that reason is the immense amounts of liquidity that both the US Federal Reserve and the private banks who are allowed to do fractional reserve lending, pump into the US economy. Thanks to the US dollar not losing value when that happens because it is (or was) used as the exclusive reserve currency due to the Gulf countries exclusively selling their oil for dollars until recently.

When you have THAT much free money, its impossible to not invest and innovate. And now that the reserve currency status of the US is challenged and some of the dollars that were used to buy stuff in the international trade is flowing back to the US and causing inflation, we are seeing how the investment landscape totally changed. With SV firms trying to reach profitability, doing layoffs, Twitter and Facebook being questioned as to the profitability etc.

This is before the fact that there is immense innovation elsewhere but you just are not aware of that since the US media need to sell US stocks. Therefore they drum the US businesses up. All of them talk about Elon Musk or whatever hot investment unicorn is coming up incessantly instead of what anyone in any other tech ecosystem is doing.

Reserve currency status isn't decided by what countries use to purchase oil.

The main drivers of the chosen reserve currency were the oil producing countries using it. Now that Yuan entered the scene, things changed.

Oil has almost nothing to do with reserve currency status. They use dollars because it is the reserve currency, not the other way around.

“the people” don’t elect anyone on the national level. If they did, Montana wouldn’t have the same number of Senators as California and the person who was elected President in 2016 would be the person who won the popular vote

> Entire world except the US does.

US does that too; it has obscenity laws, copyright laws, state secret laws, and plenty more laws that restrict what you cannot say.

The way it works absolutely everywhere else in the US is you hire a lawyer and sue the shit of them, but since they are immune from that alternative are worthy of consideration.

They already are. It came out recently that the FBI leaned on Mark Zuckerberg to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Zuckerberg was free not to listen to anything the FBI had to say. No one forced him to do anything.

This is either dishonest or naive. Federal law enforcement "advice" always comes with a hidden message of "Nice company you've got there. It would be a shame if something were to happen to it."

And what, exactly, would the FBI have done? File a lawsuit? As if Facebook doesn't know how to handle a lawsuit?

Source?

Zuckerberg said so in an interview. Google it and you can see the video. The FBI did not deny it, so safe to say it's true.

Have you seen the typical social media censorship (bans, deletions, shadowbans... no explanations... secret forbidden words lists...) and appeals process lately? It makes 1984 look like a church camp.

At least the government has checks and balances. And a working appeals process. And is, ostensibly, democratically determined.

Yes, I prefer the government here.

I think you may need to re-read 1984.