davidreiss

> This is an extremely frightening statement to me.

It truly is to me as well. It's something you expect nazis to say.

Imagine if the comment was

"The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by israel and other jewish sympathizing groups."

It's a form of intimidation to silence groups one disagrees with. I can't believe his comment is the most upvoted on HN of all places.

All the pro-censorship people here are behaving no differently than the neo-nazis they claim to hate. Not only that, both groups share the hatred of free speech and the principles which kept the US from being a nazi germany.

Everyone here is forgetting that Nazi Germany happened because germans supported censorship. Censorship allowed a minority group like the nazis to take over the government and silence everyone else. If the germans had an appreciation for free speech back then nazi germany would have been impossible since most germans opposed hitler and the nazi party. Nazi germany happened because of censorship laws which allowed hitler to ban all political parties and all speech he disagreed with.

But nobody learns history or philosophy anymore it seems.

> Whatever happened to "sticks and stones"? Do kids not learn that mantra anymore?

It seems like kids are taking gender studies instead of philosophy and that is frightening. All the arguments are based on emotion rather than reason.

Absolutely.

How is this any different than germans throwing chinese tourists in jail for making nazi salutes? Or saudis throwing atheists in jail because they offended their faith. Or russians throwing lgbt people in jail for being "offensive". Or the chinese throwing pro-democracy groups in jail because they find them offensive. Or Larry Flint in jail for distributing offensive pornography.

Anything can be viewed as offensive by anyone. That's why we have free speech rights. To protect ourselves from the offended.

It's sad that the internet ( what I grew up believing was going to be the defender of free speech ) is slowly turning into a tool for censorship. And it's sad that the population of "netizens" who were extremely pro-free speech in the 90s and 00s are turning in favor of censorship as less educated people brainwashed by the pro-censorship media join the internet.

Germany arrested chinese tourists for making nazi salute. Should we do something about germany too?

Do chinese and germans deserve free speech too or just thais?

Edit: @0xfeba

> That argument is convincing only on the shallowest level.

Only if you are pro-censorship and have no appreciation for principles.

> Germany arrested, fined, and released those tourists.

Are you saying it's good or bad?

> Thailand has given dissidents lengthy prison sentences.

But that's the law.

> How about we worry about Germany's speech laws after we free people who are stuck in retched prisons for 10 years?

How about we worry about both? How about we worry about free speech and principles.

Talk about shallowness. The german law allows for imprisonment for 3 years for nazi salutes. If the chinese got 3 years and the thai got 3 years, would you think both are equally wrong?

You don't seem to have an argument so you are just nitpicking. I don't remember you being outraged that the chinese tourists were arrested. I remember you celebrating german law.

This is why I despise censorship and control. Even against people like daily stormers and neo-nazis.

Chinese tourists gets arrested for making silly nazi salutes. Everyone celebrates it because that's german law.

This guy gets arrested for sharing silly articles. Everyone is upset he got arrested for breaking thai law.

We are going to have to have regulation to reign in these companies.

FB, GOOG, MSFT, etc all serve billions of people. FB's network has a 1 people more than china.

The pro-censorship crowd wants to distract with "government vs private company" argument but that really doesn't fly when these companies are larger, wealthier and more powerful than a handful of countries.

FB censorship would affect more people than the communist chinese censoring content in china. That is extremely dangerous.

Everything you wrote is why we have freedom of speech protection.

> But more abstractly and insidiously, the value has mutated to give license to liars and manipulators of all kinds.

It never mutated. The point of free speech is to give liars and truthtellers and everyone in between the right to speech. Otherwise, we only have speech from liars.

Free speech exists so that the liars don't get the monopoly on speech. That's everyone can have their say.

It's one of the reasons why we have progress. Imagine if we didn't have free speech. Then abolitionists or civil rights activist or LGBT activist or women's suffragists would never had a right to speak. The people in power would have denied them the right to speak.

> and to be an unwilling vehicle for the Neo Nazi movement is something that no company should want to aspire to.

Does that also apply to pornography? What about atheism? What about lgbt content?

The concerted effort by the pro-censorship crowd to exploit nazis to promote censorship is rather worrying.

As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I can't believe this is what social media and the tech industry has become. And I can't believe there are people actually supporting this kind of censorship.

What ever happened to principles? Do people not realize that they are sowing seeds of their own destruction by supporting this kind of arbitrary censorship from large social media companies, CDNs, ISPs, etc.

> That said, I think crossing this content line for an infrastructure company is a big deal, and I hope it's not repeated.

It's an incredibly terrible move. Such an arbitrary and biased move.

What has happened in the past few years where everyone defended free speech to everyone deciding arbitrary and whimsical censorship is something to be lauded? It feels like someone just flipped a switch and people became pro-censorship.

The tech industry is doing the same the chinese or russians are doing. Justifying censorship for "good/morals/etc".

Hate the nazis all you want but we are hurting ourselves by allow censorship on this level. These peole aren't going away. But now there is terrible precedent where social media/tech/etc can censor whatever they want. It's incredible.

So-called judges once ruled that blacks were property rather than human. We have a long history of "so-called judged".

Go read about what lincoln felt about judges.

His daughter is jewish and his son in law is jewish, so that must mean he hitler.

Wasn't there a study that said CEOs tend to be overrepresented in the sociopathetic personality?

CEOs of large corporations have no problem doing business with china or israel or russia or any other questionable locations.