[ffjffsfr]

People in the west are so used to freedom of speech and so focused on problems with social media. They miss the fact, that many authoritarian governments in Asia see freedom of speech in social media as a threat. They are not banning Facebook to improve quality of life, they want to limit freedom of speech.

[tensor]

People in the west are also incredibly naive about issues around speech, and even more naive about the effects of propaganda, which ironically is what dominates most western media these days.

For example, if you can say a thing, but someone with more money or influence can say the opposite thing so loud that no one can hear you, do you really have a voice? Yes, you have free speech in that you don't get retribution from the government, but you surely don't have fair speech. Effectively you have no voice.

If only your local independent reporter carries a story, and none of the major players do because they coordinate to limit what you see, do you have free speech in practice? When maybe 1% of the population hears the independent reporters, and 99% just listen to the propaganda?

Also as others have said, letting people have free reign to spread both home grown and foreign propaganda is pretty naive and as we've seen in the last several years, has a huge impact.

This is not to advocate for banning speech like you see in many authoritarian governments, but the west needs to be smarter and think deeper about what free speech actually means. At what volume do you get to speak? What consequences to your speech are allowed vs forbidden? Who gets a voice, citizens, everyone in the world including foreign adversaries? Who gets to speak anonymously? Everyone? Just citizens

[com2kid]

> which ironically is what dominates most western media these days.

Read up on the founding of the US and who funded printing all the propaganda flyers, newspapers, and pamphlets. That stuff wasn't cheap back then!

[spwa4]

People who have never seen propaganda in action don't understand: it cannot work (the way these states want it to work) in the presence of real information channels, even if that's just private conversation. That's why socialist states arrest people for just talking privately to an agent about the government.

So yes, you have free speech if major news players coordinate whatever. If on social networks you get banned. Absolutely. That's problem 1 for authoritarian regimes. This is not something any authoritarian nation will relent on even slightly.

Second they have a problem with there being any "players" at all. Because you do get different perspectives, most of which don't match the governments. Compare the news in Israel with the "news" in Russia, or with Al Jazeera and you will see the difference. In Israel, there's maybe 5 major channels. But they hate each other. Pro and contra the war perspectives are represented. In Russia, there is no anti-war perspective. In Al Jazeera there is no one questioning how the government is spending money, there is no discussion on viewpoints, on anything in the middle east. There is no discussion of corruption either, in either Russia or Qatar. None.

This illustrates the problem of propaganda: everyone knows it's bullshit. Every Russian knows Russia is less democratic than a US TSA inspection. Everyone knows everything in Qatar is entirely, 100%, corrupt.

Propaganda will fail, certainly in the eyes of the government, if there is some, any way to get real information. And it doesn't matter if it's not easy. This is how it's always been in the US, because now people have some seriously rose colored glasses on how "true" US newspapers were in the early parts of the 20th century. Reality is that in the US bullshit always dominated the news cycle. This is not new.

[petralithic]

Yes, and it's shocking to see people cheer it on. An oft-heard refrain is about the legal right of the first amendment of the US constitution preventing the government from blocking speech, but that is based on the natural right of freedom of speech, as Hobbes and Locke would differentiate. Social media platforms are at such a scale in the modern day that they are essentially the public square, so the government blocking them is akin to blocking free speech in the legal right itself.

Some might say, you can publish elsewhere on your own domain, but again, it's like barricading the public square and only allowing one to speak in the middle of a forest; if no one but the trees listen, what is the point of the natural right to free speech?

[bee_rider]

I don’t really think of social media companies as being the public square. They are more like private clubs, just with really low standards for membership.

IMO the bigger problem is the total lack of a public square these days.

The internet is more pseudonymous than we’re used to dealing with, compared to the in-person public square. People behave in ways that would normally cause their acquiescences to use their freedom of association, and avoid them. Online attempts at a public square tend to be pretty annoying, as a result.

[bigyabai]

> Social media platforms are at such a scale in the modern day that they are essentially the public square

This is a ridiculous assertion.

The local Costco is "at such a scale in the modern day" that it, too, is essentially a public square. It's still private property, though. If you show up in Aisle 6 trying to convert people to Mormonism, a Costco employee will ask you to leave and stop harassing their customers. Yes, the same principle applies to Twitter, Facebook, X, Truth Social and Instagram.

[KaiserPro]

> They are not banning Facebook to improve quality of life, they want to limit freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech is great, but not if its used by your neighbours to stir up trouble. (the civil war was long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_Civil_War)

One thing the "west" ie the USA needs to understand (well they'll know very shortly) is that the right to consume propaganda from your countries enemies is not the same as being able to criticise your government for doing a bad job/breaking the law/killing it's own citizens.

Facebook et al is not a neutral platform, it is a vector for other states, and non state actors to whip up outrage and division.

> many authoritarian governments in Asia see freedom of speech in social media as a threat

Yup, because it is a threat.

see Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia to name just a few. all have had large scale unrest transmitted and amplfied by facebook. Now are they nice governments? no. did facebook help bring democracy? also no, they helped pinpoint activists and let the government(s) kidnap them.

The indian anti-muslim movement is properly being whipped up by the BJP and others, using facebook to get to the people that don't have TVs. Facebook is a big part in why they are still in power.

[davorak]

> Facebook et al is not a neutral platform, it is a vector for other states, and non state actors to whip up outrage and division.

I would feel better about this type of activity being regulated. There is quite a bit of room for facebook to live up to higher standards and regulation to prevent that sort of behavior with out banning.

Might also be more a of a hassle to write and enforce the laws though than out right banning though.

The result of that for a country with a small market though might be facebook/similar voluntarily leaving the country/market though.

[andai]

I heard TikTok has a Chinese version which promotes educational content, has time restrictions etc.

The "export" version... not so much.

[giancarlostoro]

If free speech in America goes away, the rest of the world will suffer for it as well.

People get worked up about "hate speech" a very arbitrary thing, that changes over time, but they don't realize the slippery slope that creates if you try to police speech.

The things I've seen Australians and even British people arrested for posting or commenting on online is absurd. The people who support it are fine with it, until they're the ones being reported and getting into trouble, and handcuffed for making a one off remark that otherwise seemed innocent at the time.

Remember, these governments eventually can and will use AI models to monitor your speech. People around the world should seriously advocate for free speech more now than ever.

Also remember, the key thing in America about free speech is that the government has no say in what speech is allowed. You still have consequences for your speech from others.

[OrvalWintermute]

I had a conversation with a talented UK startup developer about a month ago at a defense industry event.

He mentioned wanting to move to the US. I assumed smugly “must be for our business environment or contractual benefits” and said as much.

He quickly responded with his concerns about being arrested for social media posts, and mentioned how many people were being arrested in the UK.

No discussion of anything about where he was on the political spectrum or anything; he was leading with this issue.

When it becomes an issue like this, we’re going to see talent flight to more favorable climates

[zh3]

Ref. the UK ('British people'), there's currently a thing where peacfully protesting a ban will get you arrested (I have a lot of sympathy for the police in this case, whatever they do will be wrong in the eyes of one side or the other).

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rvly00440o

[JumpCrisscross]

> If free speech in America goes away

What part of the President threatening financial sanctions and jail time for speech makes you think we have this?

To the degree the American experiment has shown anything about free speech, it’s that it may not work uncensored broadly. At the end of the day, we voted against it.

[cproctor]

I thought this [1] New Yorker profile of the chief justice of Brazil's Supreme Court was a fascinating and thoughtful analysis of how tech giants interact with less-powerful countries. Surely we all agree that free speech is not absolute (e.g. we could probably agree that there should exist some boundary with respect to libel, threats/violent speech acts, national security, corporations as legal persons with free speech rights, the right or duty of platforms to regulate content, influence of money in politics...) and that therefore states have a legitimate interest in regulating free speech.

The "free speech" of tech platforms also comes with colonial power structures in which the tech company makes these decisions and imposes them on countries.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/14/the-brazilian-...

[foragerdev]

and the governments of the west are most supportive of authoritarian and military regimes. Why are they silent over what is happening in Pakistan? Pakistan election was stollen by Pakistan army in day light robbery. And what happened before the election is another story. Pakistan is going through worst form of its human right/freedom of speech/democratic abuses since its independence and west seems to be careless. Just because people of Pakistan support a person who is nationalist. So, for them a dictator is better than him.

Democracy/free speech/human rights are tools for west, not a moral high ground. Hypocrisy at its peak. :)

[isaacremuant]

What freedom of speech? The "first world countries" in Europe are slowly turning up the surveillance state to not let people online if they don't provide their IDs, they want to surveil every private conversation you have at home, if it uses the internet in any way, they'd love banning encryption, VPNs, etc... but you have freedom of speech? Except when talking about thinks that are deemed "pro enemy" (Russia or whoever it is this time around).

Come on, we're living in extremely authoritian governments that pretend to be something else.

[ycombigators]

Democracy cannot survive unless we find a way to ensure we know when are listening to the people that are part of our demos and NOT people that are outside of it, actively trying to destroy it.

We had freedom of speech in the west before the Internet. That speech was not anonymous.

[mkleczek]

Anonymity is not a prerequisite to freedom of speech.

Broken lives of people harassed by anonymous trolls on social media are the dark side of anonymity.

Freedom must be accompanied by responsibility and accountability.

[okasaki]

Did the UK banning RT.com improve my quality of life?

[Winblows11]

Not sure this is correct? It loads for me on Virgin Media broadband connection (although slow), also responds to pings at 70ms.

[perching_aix]

How would you know if it didn't? You'd be comparing to an alternative future that didn't end up happening.

[fecal_henge]

Very much so.

[ycombigators]

And equally, we in the west are so used to genuine free expression of ideas we assume everyone who speaks is real and genuine. Meanwhile, outside actors are weaponising social media to divide us, errode trust and spread conspiracies. There are worse things that banning American media platforms - look at what they are doing to America.

[lioeters]

> outside actors are weaponising social media

Inside actors are also spreading misinfo, rage bait, propaganda and general degeneracy of culture. They're blaming outsiders while doing the same or even worse.

[aleatorianator]

another read is that they're not banning Facebook nor anything like that

but the Trump administration and the current USG.

it's a move against the American Culture AND government

[ToValueFunfetti]

This is an enforcement of legislation passed in 2023, so unlikely to be connected to Trump.

e: Well, unlikely to be connected to the current admin; it does target misinfo which was a big media focus surrounding the elections in 2016/2020

[ktosobcy]

on the grandour... yes, USA is the pinacle of "freedom" whole world should aspire to! /s

[IAmGraydon]

>They are not banning Facebook to improve quality of life, they want to limit freedom of speech.

Please post your evidence of this regarding Nepal. Also, are you suggesting that Nepal has an authoritarian government? Picking up a book may be helpful, as they literally abolished their authoritarian government in 1990 and their monarchy in 2008.