from Hacker News

Normal People Beginning to Acknowledge Their Loss of Free Speech on the Internet

by TLM275 on 7/2/21, 7:35 PM with 7 comments

  • by janitor61 on 7/2/21, 9:07 PM

    AFAIK the free speech that the United States enshrines applies to public venues, e.g. the street corner, radio waves, etc. As the current venue has shifted from public streets to private social media, the government should be required to create a counterpart to this emerging venue, otherwise the 1st amendment will be sidestepped based on a technicality (people willingly conglomerating on privately-controlled forums).

    The government, if it values free speech, must create a twitter/facebook equivalent, open source it and apply constitutional protections to it as an optional alternative to private venues.

    I am OK with specific venues curtailing free speech (FB, Twitter, etc) but I am vehemently against internet infrastructure curtailing free speech (hosting providers, ISPs). Together, the infrastructure providers constitute the internet and censoring free speech at that level makes the internet in violation of the first amendment, and I believe the internet was imagined as a public venue.

  • by umvi on 7/2/21, 8:46 PM

    > I believe that we can lay this whole free speech debacle at the feet of our disingenuous, power-hungry politicians.

    I blame online mobs. Twitter mobs can make even the largest corporations apologize and kowtow. Say the wrong thing and the mob will come after you and try to destroy your career, etc.

  • by kixiQu on 7/2/21, 8:39 PM

    > On a more personal note, I have mentioned in previous articles that Reddit shadow banned me breifly about two years ago. A few months ago, I was also shadow banned on Hacker News. I have no idea why, and I doubt that I will ever know. Regardless of the reason, the damage to this blog has been done. I spent a year and a half reaching the point where significant numbers of users on Hacker News were regularly reading my articles. Shadow banning me forced me to change my user name in order to continue posting. As a result of this, I am now back to only receiving a trickle of readers from Hacker News.

    Yeah, ok.

  • by mathgladiator on 7/2/21, 8:47 PM

    This is true, and I think we have yet to fully reckon with what "permanent" means with "low context".

    I'm a bit of a troll/shock that says outlandish shit, so I'm deeply appreciative of my core group of friends. I grew up shocking and making them laugh, but breaking out is really hit or miss.

    The sad thing is that once you get your tribe established, then this environment makes it too hard and costly to try to expand it. The fortunate side effect of this is then developing deeper relationships with existing friends.