454544545's comments

> target counties/municipalities that overwhelmingly voted for a different candidate

In this case, it's clearly only an issue a state could deal with.

> consistently subvert the will of the people by preempting local governments and municipalities

Do you have some examples?

DeSantis' actions are the will of the people. The only question is whether it's a violation of a corporation's free speech - and when does anyone ever really care about that.

Imagine a scenario where a corporation was talking anti-left stuff in a blue state. E.g. immigration, unions, etc. Would the people not be entitled to revoke their special privileges because they don't like what they are saying? This is the real test.

I'm actually not sure, but its interesting to flip the actors political affiliation to check for fairness.

This is confirmed by Garcetti 2006:

> that because his statements were made pursuant to his position as a public employee, rather than as a private citizen, his speech had no First Amendment protection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garcetti_v._Ceballos

The point is that the principle of free speech is far more important than any topic of the day. Enemy of my enemy situation.

Everything bad in politics has come from the downward cycle of political parties censoring each other.

It takes a lot of courage because the defenders of free speech, to also defend the right for those to campaign for the destruction of free speech. Things become really bad when exceptions are made to restrict the free speech of those campaigning against it.

You can see how easily people can fall into the trap though, because humans can only take so much abuse while being attacked by people they are inadvertently helping.

Now that Musk is in charge of Twitter, you start to see them take more interest in free speech and the importance of it.

> his forbidding of speech in schools

Garcetti 2006 - legal free speech only applies to private citizens not public employees.

The will of the people of the state should democratically determine what should be taught and what should not.

If creationism was to be taught in schools, I would certainly want the right as a private citizen to campaign against my children having to listen to that crap, without being impeded by "free speech" (a good way to evaluate free speech is to think about things you agree with and disagree with and see if you are happy with the law both cases).

> DeSantis approach to Disney

This is a interesting case indeed. Hacker News at its best when I have an excuse to dive into a case I'm not familiar with.

Personally, I think their speech is not being restricted by the new law. And the law is the will of the people.

As a voting citizen, would I really want to be denied being able to enact a law because a company complains about it's free speech rights? Probably not. I don't relate as much to a corporation than I do to an actual person - regardless of what the law says.

The retaliatory aspect is interesting though - and I would defer to the supreme court for this.

Which accounts?

I saw an article about a bunch of antifa accounts, but they were posting how to disrupt protests with violence which seems like a pretty clear violation.

There are some people I would have liked to follow in my Twitter feed that left Twitter for Mastodon.

I wonder what the rules/ethics are on reposting on Twitter without someone's permission.

So you are saying poor communities only commit more crimes because of the policing?

The "systematic racism" argument is so broad and unquantifiable and avoids so many other meaningful factors that can actually be addressed. It's a way for these communities to avoid confronting any internal problems they have - whether or not these were caused by historic racism, cycles of poverty, etc.

You should look into some stories of how criminals ended up becoming criminals. Present-day racism is rarely the cause.

France does this with age-verification for porn sites. Visit pornhub via French vpn to see.

I don't think people are outraged about "bots" being moderated. It's more about huge accounts with non-liberal views like Trump.

> with little benefit.

I would say one of the first changes would be to re-instate Trump, which would bring back a huge amount of free marketing.

Here is a single account that by far generated the most brand awareness of Twitter than anything else. "Twitter" was mentioned in every news outlet every single day. And it drove engagement from both sides.

I think a lot of people can see the liberal bias hurting the company and were waiting for something like this. Just look at how many people are coming out from the wood work talking about free speech.

The funny thing is that here is a platform where you can choose who you listen to and who you don't by following and blocking, contrasted to all other news outlets who give you no filtering options, and force you to literally switch off the service if you don't want to hear from someone.

It makes no sense for Twitter to need to ban people.