5/17/2026 at 6:21:35 PM
In a sane world, the US as a supposed bastion of free speech and personal liberties would enact legislation that requires companies to provide a specific, articulable reason for suspending accounts due to rules violations and offer everyone the chance to appeal. That would serve as a counterbalance to more authoritarian regimes insisting companies like Meta censor people, even if the US can’t guarantee it for people not affiliated with the US. Unfortunately, the US seems more intent on censoring its own residents and becoming one of those authoritarian regimes than actually doing anything about it.by Tyrubias
5/17/2026 at 6:35:39 PM
> requires companies to provide a specific, articulable reason for suspending accountswouldn't that violate free speech though? forcing a company to keep something up/take something down is entirely up to them no?
by KaiserPro
5/17/2026 at 6:45:19 PM
You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.Free speech does not cover scams and fraud, something that happens on their platform. Society doesn't take any action against them for publishing illegal content, scams, libel, fraud, because they aren't a newspaper. They're more like a newspaper printing house.
In my opinion they should probably be losing those protections and should suffer legal consequences for the content their users post. The moderation has reached a point where they ate defacto editorialising content.
An alternative to that could be opting in to some kind of third party moderation arbitration process.
by traverseda
5/17/2026 at 7:14:18 PM
> You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content.Aha, now this is an interesting distinction. I'm not an expert in this, as you might imagine, but what counts as editorialising?
To my naive eyes, having an algorithm that re-arranges posts, or injects new subjects seems like editorialising to me.
by KaiserPro
5/17/2026 at 7:32:43 PM
I'm also not a lawyer, I was making that as a more vague moral distinction on the topic of free speech and accountability.For practical reasons I think those algorithms are absolutely necessary. We need spam filters. A good line to draw would be "bring your own algorithm". A technical challenge to be sure, bit breaking up social media backend providers and content filtering seems like one of the only safe ways to allow these massive platforms to exist.
The algorithm can be just "Dan filters out spam".
by traverseda
5/17/2026 at 8:04:16 PM
Even spam filters are problematic.At first, its just unsolicited commercial crap.
Then its non-corporate allowed unsolicited commercial crap.
Then its 'hide commercial crap in posts to deceive'.
Then its 'fuck over screen readers by aligning everything weird like FB to prevent finding commercial crap'
Then its "hey we can add these other non-spam categories (like Palestine) to silence them".
by mystraline
5/17/2026 at 8:29:16 PM
> Aha, now this is an interesting distinction.It's nothing new; the entire point of §230 is to provide protection to platforms that editorialize their content. Without editorializing, you have immunity anyway.
by thaumasiotes
5/18/2026 at 3:26:55 AM
Most online platforms will become unusable if it becomes legally untenable for them to set their own rules about what is allowed and what is not.Just take this website for example. If HN stops all forms of moderation, I bet you it will be flooded by wannabe startup entrepreneurs selling vibe coded SaaS overnight, right before every thread devolves into generic flame war about politics and whatnot.
And by the way, making platforms liable for scam and fraud that they do not intentionally allow turns every platform into the de facto arbitrator of what is scam and what is not, ironically giving them more power to control speech than they already do. Just look at how often DMCA takedowns are abused or how often the fraud detection on google etc misfires and censors legitimate websites to get a sneak peek of the future your good intentions pave the way to.
by pibaker
5/17/2026 at 7:45:49 PM
> You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.That's hilariously impractical. Just because you want to and can moderate some things doesn't mean you can guarantee rapid moderation of illegal stuff. When your platform is nominally open to everyone, and has millions of users, that just doesn't work out well.
by TulliusCicero
5/17/2026 at 8:23:38 PM
“The business can’t survive if it has to play by the rules” is not a compelling reason to not make rules in my opinion.by LPisGood
5/18/2026 at 3:29:45 AM
What will happen in reality is the too big too fail platforms stay online by regulatory carve outs and smaller mom and pop forums shutdown, just like what is already happening now under other internet regulations.by pibaker
5/17/2026 at 7:55:45 PM
Maybe platforms shouldn't be allowed to grow too large to manage themselves. Maybe, if strong self-regulation were a requirement, Meta and other companies wouldn't be market behemoths throwing their weight around in lobbying money to guarantee themselves monopolies while avoiding as much real scrutiny as possible.by moron4hire
5/17/2026 at 8:20:00 PM
Meta is enormous because it's useful. It's mostly useful now because of network effects. If it has no other use, Bluesky proves you can start a social media company in the time of Meta and have it be successful, given its slanty take on politics.by philipallstar
5/17/2026 at 8:47:30 PM
facebook of course, has the money to be responsible for its users comments and postsby 8note
5/18/2026 at 1:35:29 AM
I'm sorry but this is ridiculous. How on earth do you think Meta has money? Scale. If you descale it, it has no money to pay people to review everything.And that's the less troubling issue. The more troubling one is you would be crazy enough to entrust Meta with the task of inspecting everyone's messages on the planet. That's some planet scale, ruinous communism.
by philipallstar
5/17/2026 at 8:59:10 PM
>You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.Hi. You seem to be confused or uninformed. Check out this link[0]. IT should help.
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
by GetTheFacts
5/18/2026 at 12:26:44 AM
>You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. *I don't think* you should have both.Personal opinion, not legal opinion.
by traverseda
5/18/2026 at 12:38:21 AM
>>You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.>Personal opinion, not legal opinion.
Fair enough. But not very charitable (or helpful/useful to freedom of speech) to anyone who doesn't have billions in cash on hand to fight the hundreds/thousands of lawsuits anyone who doesn't like what the thoughts of others that you (or I) choose to host on our platforms, whether they be web sites, mailing lists or video comment sections.
Section 230 protects the little guy much more than it does Meta, Alphabet, Musk, etc. As they have the deep pockets to fight those lawsuits. Do you? I don't.
by GetTheFacts
5/17/2026 at 8:44:56 PM
i disagree, this just leaves the door open for whatever your preferred manipulation style is. Moderation was added with a purposejust take away safe harbour as a whole. we dont need to subsidize the existence of Facebook and AWS and ISPs.
by 8note
5/18/2026 at 1:24:40 AM
Without safe harbor, would Hacker News have to be shuttered?by no-name-here
5/17/2026 at 9:33:48 PM
> wouldn't that violate free speech though?Free speech can mean two things:
(1) The general philosophical postulate, that society is better when there is a high level of freedom in the exchange of ideas and critique of other's ideas.
(2) One aspect of the above is that government should not censor speech. Like the 1st amendment in USA.
But if most public discourse takes place on forums owned by companies, and the companies start to practice high levels of censorship, then we might formally satisfy (2) but still won't get the cultural benefits of (1).
by sampo
5/17/2026 at 10:30:40 PM
Free speech is specifically limiting the government’s ability to limit your speech, not private enterprise, and its limited to the US. The US government can legally try to restrict the speech of … I don’t know let’s say Palestinians.by philistine
5/17/2026 at 10:39:10 PM
I'd think, in a sane world, an individuals free speech trumps a company's.by xboxnolifes
5/17/2026 at 7:48:28 PM
No. We compel and restrict commercial speech all the time.by michaelmrose
5/17/2026 at 9:07:24 PM
> wouldn't that violate free speech though?It's balancing the company's freedom of association against the individual's freedom of speech.
Look, the world criticised Facebook for facilitating a genocide in Burma [1]. There is a moral argument for American social media companies policing their speech to some degree. But that doesn't mean there shouldn't also be a process of appeal, data offloading, et cetera.
[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
by JumpCrisscross
5/17/2026 at 7:04:38 PM
Requiring a provider of a public accommodation to explain their decisions and have standard policies for implementing them is no restriction on free speech.by skywhopper
5/17/2026 at 7:20:45 PM
It shouldn't. But under this Supreme Court it might.Corporations are creations of the state and treating them as strictly private, especially when they're trampling rights, is illiberal horse-shit, and is straight up insulting when done under the guise of defending liberalism. And there's plenty of room for nuance, we don't have to (and already do not) regulate family businesses or 50-employee enterprises like we do transnational mega corporations with more capital than many entire countries.
by funimpoded
5/17/2026 at 6:49:59 PM
Don't conflate the broad concept of free speech, with the specific attempt at its defense that is the 1st amendment of the US constitution.Giant unaccountable companies privatizing the public square harms free speech. Forcing them to at least reveal why something was censored would help free speech more than it would harm it. Unless you subscribe to the myopic legalistic 1st amendment position that "free speech" is maximized when companies can act with the least restrictions, no matter how unable to speak or be heard that makes individuals, so long as it wasn't the government that silenced them.
by like_any_other
5/17/2026 at 7:16:32 PM
I'm british, so I am not an absolutist by any stretch of the meaning. I just know that whenever I have queried why companies like facebook are not held liable for the content they promote, I am told that the 1st amendment allows them to do pretty much what they like, along with Section 230by KaiserPro
5/17/2026 at 8:16:27 PM
You don't have a constitutional right to post on Facebook. When you invest your life into platforms run by for profit corporations, you agree to play by their rules. Merging state and big tech is not going to help.by montroser
5/17/2026 at 8:24:48 PM
You have many constitutional protections that do apply in business relationships. Extending that list is at minimum worth considering.by Retric
5/17/2026 at 9:01:08 PM
> You don't have a constitutional right to post on FacebookWhich is why OP describes the U.S. enacting legislation creating a statutory right.
by JumpCrisscross
5/18/2026 at 2:27:55 AM
You are correct. But it's a ridiculous suggestion. Can you imagine the local corner store with a bulletin board, and some patron tacks up a picture of a swastika, and the owner of the store is not allowed to take it down?by montroser
5/17/2026 at 9:32:51 PM
Au contraire, enacting such a law is akin to forcing FB to support certain speech. That itself is unconstitutional and any such legislation would be struck down.by prasadjoglekar
5/17/2026 at 8:23:36 PM
> You don't have a constitutional right to post on Facebook.Well, that depends on who says you don't. If the government says so, they are wrong, because you do have a constitutional right enforceable against the government to post on Facebook.
The idea of saying "you don't have a constitutional right to post on Facebook" is that you don't have such a right enforceable against Facebook.
Which is true. But under current US law, you do have a civil right enforceable against any public accommodation to be offered the same service that they offer to the public generally.
by thaumasiotes
5/17/2026 at 8:55:44 PM
There is a reason moderation decisions are not perfectly transparent: They are gamed otherwise. So there needs to be legal recourse with discovery and meaningful liability attached to submitting to the role of acting as the agent of a foreign government.by heisenbit
5/17/2026 at 6:52:27 PM
Unfortunately we live in a world where any attempt to regulate "big tech" is met by massive campaigns to prevent it.by benoau
5/17/2026 at 7:39:17 PM
Just realizing that being a lobbyist is job security these daysby NetOpWibby
5/17/2026 at 6:39:51 PM
Agreed but Meta also banned a standing US president, under pressure from other Americans that claim they believe in free speech. It's clear that Meta doesn't stand for free speech and will ban anyone. It's also clear that many in the US don't want free speech, they only want their speech to be free.by ptdcc
5/17/2026 at 7:47:18 PM
Free speech is fundamentally about the government restricting your speech, not private platforms. There is no constitutional right to post on Facebook.Amazing how certain people do their best to ignore this, every single time.
by TulliusCicero
5/18/2026 at 3:32:45 AM
Freedom of speech also prevents the government using jawboning or implied threats to bully private companies into doing their will. Government doesn’t always need the cover of law to accomplish something.by iamnothere
5/17/2026 at 8:07:56 PM
There are laws the restricting speech. There are laws for preventing people from platforms in some cases.Talk of what's in the constitution doesn't really matter. This person may seem not protected but a different government could go after meta for foreign influence.
It's also a lesson not to trust companies who have a global presence because they are as good as who they do business with.
by ipaddr
5/17/2026 at 8:09:09 PM
> Free speech is fundamentally about the government restricting your speech, not private platforms.A corporate charter is granted at the BEHEST of the People and the Government.
They are at best an artificial entity, and should be an extension of the laws binding government.
Frankly, the current situation of "You can say whatever you want legally (well, not really), but your job will fire you for it and youll end up in a homeless encampment". Yeah, thats real freedom.
So basically its real freedom for the Musks and Trumps of the world to sieg heil on stage, but fuck the citizenry for their attempt at speaking out.
by mystraline
5/17/2026 at 7:07:25 PM
There were plenty of "specific, articulable reasons" to ban that account for rule violationsThere is a valuable discussion about whether those rules should be there. But as long as they are, enforcing them on all platform users is the just thing to do
by wongarsu
5/17/2026 at 6:57:09 PM
I figured the speech part was ok until it declined into an active coup but that's just me.by hilariously
5/17/2026 at 8:53:08 PM
The American right to free speech has never extended to fomenting an armed mob and directing them to commit criminal acts.by jmcgough
5/17/2026 at 6:53:10 PM
When the standing president uses his speech to incite violence at the capital, attempt a coup, spread proven lies about health issues directly harming citizens...oh, right, free speech. everyones allowed to do anything because they use their VOICE to INCITE harm and that's enough abstraction that others can't see the facade???
bull shit.
by thejazzman
5/17/2026 at 7:02:24 PM
“Free speech” has never meant you can say or do anything you want.by skywhopper
5/17/2026 at 7:28:33 PM
Which is true here, except "do anything you want" is "be displeasing to Kuwait".It's all "they're a private company, they can ban anyone they want" right up until they ban someone who promoters of that idea don't like. Then they're suddenly horrible people for being a private company that bans anyone they want.
by Jiro
5/17/2026 at 8:53:32 PM
if they are doing business in kuwait, theyre gonna be reponsible to kuwaiti law.> Then they're suddenly horrible people for being a private company that bans anyone they want.
with twitter, people did exactly what is intended - if you dont like it, make your own. now there is truth social and blue sky and threads.
people say twitter is run by horrible people, but nobody is restricting musk's rights to have a vanity project. its a right to speech, not to be liked
by 8note
5/17/2026 at 8:12:55 PM
> It's all "they're a private company, they can ban anyone they want" right up until they ban someone who promoters of that idea don't like. Then they're suddenly horrible people for being a private company that bans anyone they want.If they are NOT acting as an impartial aggregator and only censoring/deleting when the law demands, then they should NOT be covered under Section 230.
Thats quite simple.
by mystraline
5/17/2026 at 8:34:55 PM
This is either an "ought to be* statement or it is a deliberate misreading of section 230 and case law. Representatives have proposed enacting this, many times, but platform neutrality is not a requirement under current law.by tadfisher
5/17/2026 at 9:02:05 PM
i dont see why the government needs to be so prescriptive about how companies run?the current law allows for impartial and biased/focused platforms to exist, so customers can access a variety of platforms and discussion fora.
in your proposal, something like banjo hangout couldnt exist as a platform focused on banjo picking, frailing, and building, because posts debating sailing vs rowing arent allowed
by 8note
5/17/2026 at 8:21:24 PM
I think your comment, perhaps unintentionally, downplays the seriousness of the January 6th coup attempt.America has since decided to essentially forget about January 6th but there was a brief period of time where pretty much everyone figured Trump was toast. Impeached, removed, and probably set to be put on trial for serious crimes against the USA. I know the guy has a knack for escaping consequences but it came really close to happening.
He is a convicted felon and that’s despite these multiple criminal inquiries being scrapped due to his 2024 election win.
If he had lost the election, there is a high chance he could have been serving some kind of criminal sentence.
You also can’t wave the “free speech” thing around without understanding what the first amendment is about. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences, it’s freedom from the government controlling speech and the government giving you consequences for your protected speech.
That specifically includes the government not being allowed to police social networks on who they decide to ban or allow on platforms.
Facebook is legally allowed to be a liberals/conservatives-only social media platform if they want to be that. I’m even allowed to discriminate on hiring employees based on their political beliefs, it’s not a protected class.
by dangus
5/18/2026 at 12:53:01 AM
I was with you for the first part, but corpos have gotten to the scale where they wield power much closer to governments than individuals. In fact I'd say this is precisely why so many large corpos, traditionally thought of as desiring stability, continue to back societal arsonist Trump - they're trying to destroy as much of the United States Government as they can, so they can step into the power vacuum and exert even more governmental power.The real problem is the Constitutional framing of our rights in a negative manner that does not lend itself to judgements based on equitable weighing of parties' interests. The comment you're responding to tries to lay out refinements to our legal implementation of freedom of speech that at least tries to mitigate some of these problems. Fixing these problems (ie neutering the governmental power of corpos) would be a step in the right direction.
by mindslight
5/17/2026 at 6:38:42 PM
Becoming? It has always been this way.by dev_l1x_be
5/17/2026 at 8:51:08 PM
Presumably Kuwait could just assemble a panel of self-proclaimed experts to denounce the speech of people threatening to the regime to be "very dangerous to our democracy", "hate speech", islamophobic, etc.by stinkbeetle
5/17/2026 at 6:49:41 PM
The US are an oligarchy with the PR department being instructed to claim they are thr bastion of free speech though, so ex falso quodlibet.by OtomotO
5/17/2026 at 6:52:57 PM
Oligarchy and oligopoly as well.by tamimio
5/17/2026 at 6:40:44 PM
[dead]by iamalizard
5/17/2026 at 7:33:26 PM
[dead]by warumdarum
5/17/2026 at 6:47:37 PM
[dead]by hankerapp
5/17/2026 at 6:32:04 PM
[flagged]by giancarlostoro
5/17/2026 at 7:27:04 PM
I once spent an hour or so tracking down and reading parts of the twitter files specifically highlighted by people loudly complaining about them (as I figured those would be the worst bits) and it was mostly pretty yawn-worthy in context.That might be why they didn't get more attention.
by funimpoded
5/17/2026 at 7:48:41 PM
So you're saying that the FBI using Twitter as a proxy to violate US citizens First Amendment right is not an issue? Because that's my entire point. There is absolutely no context that okays the FBI doing this, once you open pandoras box, you allow other administrations (including the current) to use the same "power" that they should have never had to begin with.by giancarlostoro
5/17/2026 at 11:23:04 PM
“Yo, this violates your rules” and then twitter sometimes going “yep, true, we’ll do something” and sometimes “nah” is pretty low on my list of concerns, yeah.Then again I also don’t think any company should have the reach any of the major media companies do these days. But antitrust and media-diversity regulations and laws have been out of fashion since the ‘70s.
by funimpoded
5/18/2026 at 5:22:13 AM
Except Twitter staff debated if they actually broke any rules repeatedly, and later said, that, nope, no they did not. So you're not making any sense. Why read the raw source if you're not paying attention to their own words after the fact where the executives admit they goofed big time?by giancarlostoro
5/17/2026 at 6:39:50 PM
In a sane world, hackernews wouldn't shadowban accounts for wrongthink.by bekon
5/17/2026 at 6:56:27 PM
citation?by anonymousiam
5/17/2026 at 8:12:55 PM
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21081770by ipaddr
5/17/2026 at 8:53:03 PM
This is not shadow banning, it is increased moderation for new accounts. There's a big difference.by anonymousiam
5/17/2026 at 8:15:17 PM
[dead]by breck
5/17/2026 at 6:41:06 PM
> the US as a supposed bastion of free speechOnly americans believe that, this is almost as dumb as when they try to use dollars in Europe, "but it is valid tender I tell you!" or when they believe their TSA precheck works in China
by toasty228
5/17/2026 at 6:53:24 PM
My point is that Americans claim this, but it’s partially propaganda.by Tyrubias
5/17/2026 at 6:42:26 PM
Do Americans often try to use dollars in Europe?by gatlin
5/17/2026 at 6:46:11 PM
They also try to drive to canada with their guns, and believe they can't be "foreigners" because they're american. 30% of americans are functionally illiterate, no surprise really.https://immigration.ca/americans-frequently-caught-bringing-...
by toasty228
5/17/2026 at 8:25:18 PM
Embarrassing, but the statistic cited there is 6 cases in 2017 for a single crossing point, looks like there are ~1.5M visits a year[1] so I would imagine even if we're talking hundreds of cases (generous), still not too common?1: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/as-canadian-visits-to-t...
by blacksmith_tb
5/17/2026 at 6:52:19 PM
Yes.Everyone has a story about being stuck behind an irate American who can't understand why their currency isn't accepted abroad.
I've seen it in the UK - when a tourist tried to leave a tip in dollars for a bemused waiter.
by edent
5/17/2026 at 7:29:53 PM
US currency is accepted in a surprisingly large number of countries abroad. Just not in Europe proper. US dollars are even accepted in some European sovereign territories outside of Europe.It is very convenient for Americans. Depending on the parts of the world you've traveled it is easy to get the impression that the US dollar is a sort of universal currency.
Which isn't to excuse the people in your story. It is pretty easy to find out if US currency works where you are traveling.
by jandrewrogers
5/17/2026 at 8:34:36 PM
I've seen plenty of waiters, taxi drivers, etc., be quite happy to receive tips in USD in many countries where USD is not the official currency. In fact, I can't think of a single time when I've seen such a tip be rejected because of its currency.That's quite different from trying to pay a bill (invoice) in USD in those countries.
by sib
5/17/2026 at 9:09:26 PM
In Romania, at least a few decades ago, tips from foreigners were expected to be in dollars. Tipping in Lei would be weird.by dotancohen
5/17/2026 at 9:25:35 PM
No one expected anything and there wasn't any weirdness in getting a tip in your national currency. It's just that people happily accepted strong/popular foreign currency like the US dollar (I think that the Deutsche Mark was another option).Sometimes you could even pay with it even if it wasn't officially accepted. Getting some money and then exchanging it yourself into the national currency (so that the accounting books are in order) is better than getting no money. And if it's a fuss, just charge a big extra, there's no need to make a big deal out of it.
by ciupicri
5/17/2026 at 8:19:36 PM
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. The US is only a bastion of free speech when what is said aligns to their thinking and goals. UK is the same - if not worse.by ebbi
5/17/2026 at 11:41:25 PM
dang has made clear this sort of nationalistic generalities aren't allowed on HN. I'm guessing he'll be clearing out a bunch of these comments.by _DeadFred_