What happened to the party of Free Speech absolutism?
Edit: for those claiming this isn't a free speech issue the President is using the FCC to go after people he doesn't like. He must be a special snowflake.
Their speech was never in jeopardy, they just didn’t like its consequences. And now that they have the upper hand they will try to actively impose the same restrictions which they accused others of placing on them.
Victimhood distorts reality and leads to outsized reprisals.
> Their speech was never in jeopardy, they just didn’t like its consequences.
Can't you say the same about the Jimmy Kimmel situation? He's not in jail, he's free to speak, his employer just didn't want to back him up on it.
All of the arguments used to excuse cancel culture ("right to speech not to a platform", "it's a company censoring you, not the government", "freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences") are now being leveraged by the right. Why did anyone think it would go any other way? Was the assumption that the left would own the cultural zeitgeist forever? This whole approach to politics was folly.
To play devil's advocate, ABC doesn't have a right to execute a corporate merger and this is what was threatened by the FCC. I don't know what the courts would think of this kind of argument and unfortunately we will probably not find out.
Regardless of that, it certainly seems like some kind of corruption.
I think you’re right on Kimmel while being wrong about TFA.
The president does not get to dictate broadcasting licenses on the basis of whether or not they criticize him but ABC is not required to platform Kimmel.
(I think it’s a bad move to deplatform people and bad for democracy but it’s been misconstrued into an issue of constitutional guarantees and it is not one.)
>All of the arguments used to excuse cancel culture ("right to speech not to a platform", "it's a company censoring you, not the government", "freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences") are now being leveraged by the right.
Those arguments are correct though. Free speech doesn't guarantee a platform. Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences. The First Amendment does only apply to the government. None of this was controversial until the right decided shitposting their hot takes on black people and the Holocaust was a fundamental human right.
And they're being leveraged by the same right wing that wanted the government to seize control of social media platforms and force them to allow right-wing content and make moderation illegal. And Jimmy Kimmel's firing was due to pressure by the chair of the FCC, which isn't even the context in which those arguments were made and is an obvious violation of the First Amendment
> because they were being banned for their hot takes on black people and the Holocaust
This was the sales pitch, but it wasn't reality. People were being banned for much less severe speech than this kind of stuff and the window was slowly creeping towards less and less severe disagreements with the dominant narrative. I think bans for COVID stuff were particularly galling for many people[1].
There's a fair argument that the COVID situation was dire and required drastic action, but this can't be papered over in retrospect by saying that only holocaust deniers and racists were being banned.
OK, holocaust deniers, racists and anti-vaxxers. The point is, platforms always had a right to ban people, that was always the deal. And it still isn't the same as actual government oppression of free speech, which is clearly what's happening WRT this Charlie Kirk stuff. Even if you take the most cynical, negative interpretation of the COVID misinformation bans and "Twitter Files" to me this still seems categorically worse.
> Was the assumption that the left would own the cultural zeitgeist forever?
Yes, that was clearly the assumption. It's hard to blame them; that had been the case for 50+ years, and the early 2020s suggested that they had the system licked and would be fully in charge until their internal contradictions brought them down.
When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because this is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because this is according to my principles. - Frank Herbert
It’s just a tool, a weapon im their arsenal. They are still pushing the free speech narrative in other places, eg. Europe, when people try to stop candidates and pundits from lying. But then obviously once they succeed lying their way into power that tool isn’t necessary anymore, and controlling speech becomes important.
This isn’t true. They couldn’t stop talking about free speech and how their hate speech should be allowed and if you didn’t like it you’re just a snowflake.
"In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town; and under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree."
Y combinator isn't hackers. It's venture capitalists trying to advertise to computer nerds to make lots of money.
VCs in the late 1970s (the real age of "hackers") were, in the words of John Doerr, considered "filthy real estate salesmen." This was the opinion at the time of Andy Grove, who was CEO of intel during its rise.
The big companies and VCs are cowering to protect their investments.
HN has a general rule against posts about politics that occasionally gets ignored for particularly noteworthy events.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
How will US politics affect HN startup's potential market? How will it affect their ability to form, hire and retain staff? Will it affect the H1b's that underpin all sorts of programming efforts. Will it lead to VC money sloshing into Europe/UK? ... There's all sorts of HN-relevant things that are impacted damn near daily by US politics.
Not counting all of the impact on health, medicine, science, ... One can keep flagging away, but if you're going to watch the cash flow elsewhere and the jobs remain open, I would think some concern is merited. And if, somehow, people working in this area realize what their work has helped produced...
If you are quoting the guidelines quote this one also: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I would say, to see the USA moving into Nazism, in realtime, in my lifetime, is a pretty amazing intellectual endeavor to dissect.
Can you explain why you think it's moving specifically to Nazism? There's certainly an argument to be made for authoritarianism or some other version of non-democratic rule, however throwing around Nazism weakens that argument instead of strengthening it given how overused that term/accusation is at this point.
Their media organ Fox News, on air, called for straight up execution of undesirables. And then did the weakest milk toast walk back. Fox felt comfortable enough with the situation that their host said this on air.
They've tried building concentration camps. They're muzzling the press, they're thinking of banning the opposition, they oppose "them", and are going to great lengths to harm them. They're muzzling scientists and doctors, leading to population exodus. I'm sure there's other things I'm missing.
But this is a reasonable approximation to where things stood in, say, 1937. Granted, they've not gone after neighbouring countries (yet?) but they've had their vom Raths, Horst Wessel's, ... And we'll see if the Reichstag burns over the next year. If they screw up the mid-term elections or talk about an enabling act or let trump run a 3rd term, will that be good enough for ya?
And they talk about racial purity and limit women's roles and future. I'm sure there's a lebensraum in there somewhere. If you think using the term "Nazi" Godwin's the discussion, ok, just use Fascist. You have more countries to compare to with that term: Italy, Spain, Portugal, ...
This is like saying the Nazis were socialists because they had "socialist" in the name of the party. Just because a group brands itself as something doesn't mean they are that thing.
The charitable interpretation here is that you don't realize what your post looks like in context, and you're being weirdly pedantic, sharing an abstract possibility that we have no reason to believe is relevant in this case.
The uncharitable assertion is that you want people to believe that the label is incorrect... but you're afraid or incapable of making the argument, so you are maliciously sowing doubt.
I wouldn't be completely surprised if there were a night of the long knives against democrats (if several high profile assassinations were to happen, for example), but to reach Nazism you'd need gas chambers
I think "rando" actually downplays how bad it is, since it sounds like a guest. The guy (Brian Kilmeade) works for Fox and has been hosting their opinion-shows for ~27 years.
In this clip [0] of "Fox and Friends", the first host (Lawrence Jones) says that homeless people be forced to accept "the programs" from the government, or else be locked up in prison... and then Brian Kilmeade ramps it up with "just kill 'em", using "involuntary lethal injection."
If we're being absolutely pedantic, I don't know if Nazism is the adequate term here. But putting that aside, the argument is that we're progressing towards it, not that we're in the final stages of that transformation.
Also, why gas chambers specifically? The means don't matter as much as the objectives.
-Right wing media personalities advocating for euthanizing the homeless and receiving little pushback. Germany also executed ‘undesirables’ during the holocaust along with 6 million Jews.
-The government attempting to control speech by removing broadcast licenses from networks that don’t comply. Joseph Goebbels blacklisted actors that were not fully onboard with the Nazi regime [0]
Those are just the examples I can think of from the past week. All of the anti-science, anti-medicine, and anti-intellectualism over the past 6 months as well.
Edit: for those claiming this isn't a free speech issue the President is using the FCC to go after people he doesn't like. He must be a special snowflake.
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