Saying "President threatens to shut down HN" is silly. It should be "President threatens to shut down HN unless they either stop censoring libertarian and conservative voices OR they declare themselves as publishers which allows average Joe to sue them if needed". Right now they are acting as a publisher while enjoying the immunities offered by claiming to be a platform.
60 years ago, LGBT voices would have been censored on tech platforms. Few years before that, blacks were censored.
I am a brown immigrant myself (I try not to bring it up as I think it shouldn't matter but it does in this context) and I get called nazi and white supremacist and all sorts of names on Reddit just because I have certain right leaning views. I am libertarian myself. I am banned from pretty much every politics and news subs. I find it impossible to even put my voice on Reddit on political topics and the same is true here for HN too. People say "build your own site" but when we do, we get attacked and dropped by providers. I think people have a hard time empathizing because they aren't in the same shoes.
Also the "private corporation" excuse is never used when for example the Baker who couldn't bake the cake for the gay couple for religious reasons got taken to court 3 times. I don't agree with the Baker and I would bake the cake myself but I would allow him to practice his own religious views. I don't like the double standard.
Also it is well studied that the brains in left leaning people is different than right leaning. For example the "amygdalas" is more active in right leaning people. It's an area of the brain that's associated with expressing and processing fear and threats. It's a biological difference. Falls in a similar category of race, sex etc.
When 50% of the population is being throttled, I think it's time to fix things.
Do you think it's fair for a site like Reddit to provide all sorts of porn to a 12 year old kid but ban right leaning views? How can democracy exist when half the population can't voice their opinion.
Also I am not just talking about censorship of right wingers. I am talking about people like Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang too. Nor am I talking just about US. Canada and others like HK and Taiwan too.
1 more thing. From the proposals made by Josh Hawley:
> Preserves existing immunity for small and medium-sized companies. The bill applies only to companies with more than 30 million active monthly users in the U.S., more than 300 million active monthly users worldwide, or who have more than $500 million in global annual revenue
Size is irrelevant. 5 people or 50 million, freedom of the press is freedom of the press.
And Twitter enjoys no immunity here. If the President wants to sue them for defamation or libel for fact-checking them, he's welcome to. They own the fact-check copy. I'd have no issue with him suing them as a private citizen. Good luck with it, I say to him. Truth is an affirmative defense.
As for the rest... I don't know what to tell you. Freedom of the press does not imply requirement others listen, or obligation to provide presses to people. Demanding those things implies the ideas cannot stand on their own in the common marketplace.
(Baker is a different issue; sexual orientation is a protected class in law. Political views or "being President" is not, for self-evident reasons).
> Justices handed a small victory to Melissa and Aaron Klein, the owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa in Gresham, Oregon by dismissing a state court ruling against them and telling state judges to look at it again. By doing so they avoided a high-profile decision on competing claims between gay rights activists and businesses which refuse to serve them on religious grounds, an issue which could have become electric in an election year had it stayed on the court's docket into 2020...
So in this one, the supreme court didn't really make a decision. They sent it back to the lower court.
But that baker is now back in court again with a different gay couple. So people definitely like forcing him:
> 2018 ruling, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which the Court ruled that a Colorado baker who refused to make a cake for the wedding of two men must do so.
Another case also had opposite outcome:
> A similar case, involving a florist in Washington state who refused to provide flowers for a same-sex ceremony there, is on the way to the high court. The Washington Supreme Court had previously ruled against the florist, reviewed the case in light of the Masterpiece decision, and recently reaffirmed its unanimous decision.
Notice the common thread: the bakers in question are only able to even float the case by claiming their cakes are artistic expression, and therefore protected. Good luck passing the most basic argument that providing electricity is artistic expression. And this entire diversion is irrelevant to the meta-question; the President is trying to censor speech he doesn't like, he's not trying to force speech out of someone who would prefer to be silent. Your examples of LGBT and black voices being censored in the past are irrelevant; if the President were, hypothetically, saying "Black people" or "LGBTQ people are human beings, deserving of all rights" and Twitter were fact-checking with boxes saying "[citations from phrenology] indicate black people have inferior brain construction," that would be distasteful and disgusting in the extreme, and worthy of leaving Twitter over as an individual user... But not something the President should shut them down for. The First Amendment exists (among other reasons) so the President's viewpoint isn't the only legally allowed viewpoint, for good and ill.
You dodged the meta-question by trying to appeal to the specific attack on Section 230 that has been proposed (scoped to particular sizes) so you didn't have to answer whether the HN shutdown hypothetical would be acceptable. It would not be. Neither would shutting down Twitter. Size is irrelevant.
60 years ago, LGBT voices would have been censored on tech platforms. Few years before that, blacks were censored.
I am a brown immigrant myself (I try not to bring it up as I think it shouldn't matter but it does in this context) and I get called nazi and white supremacist and all sorts of names on Reddit just because I have certain right leaning views. I am libertarian myself. I am banned from pretty much every politics and news subs. I find it impossible to even put my voice on Reddit on political topics and the same is true here for HN too. People say "build your own site" but when we do, we get attacked and dropped by providers. I think people have a hard time empathizing because they aren't in the same shoes.
Also the "private corporation" excuse is never used when for example the Baker who couldn't bake the cake for the gay couple for religious reasons got taken to court 3 times. I don't agree with the Baker and I would bake the cake myself but I would allow him to practice his own religious views. I don't like the double standard.
Also it is well studied that the brains in left leaning people is different than right leaning. For example the "amygdalas" is more active in right leaning people. It's an area of the brain that's associated with expressing and processing fear and threats. It's a biological difference. Falls in a similar category of race, sex etc.
When 50% of the population is being throttled, I think it's time to fix things.
Do you think it's fair for a site like Reddit to provide all sorts of porn to a 12 year old kid but ban right leaning views? How can democracy exist when half the population can't voice their opinion.
Also I am not just talking about censorship of right wingers. I am talking about people like Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang too. Nor am I talking just about US. Canada and others like HK and Taiwan too.
1 more thing. From the proposals made by Josh Hawley:
> Preserves existing immunity for small and medium-sized companies. The bill applies only to companies with more than 30 million active monthly users in the U.S., more than 300 million active monthly users worldwide, or who have more than $500 million in global annual revenue
So HN won't be covered anyway.