81–90 of 94 posts
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Were the Snowden documents really legally grey? The Guardian had no problem publishing them.
The Guardian was also forced to destroy copies of the files it owned by the UK government.
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I love the unspoken sentiment behind your experience. "I took to facebook to post links to grey legal documents rather than hosting them myself because I wanted facebook to be liable; Im shocked when they told me they didn't appreciate the transfer of risk. It's literally censorship I tell you!" Freedom of speech is not, and hopefully never will be,"freedom to post on other people's servers unmoderated".
While it’s well within Facebook’s rights to censor content that appears on their platform, it’s also within OP’s rights to call out their attempts to whitewash and sanitize their little part of the Internet. It seems HN readership likes to stand up and defend these companies when they get rid of stuff we don’t like, like Nazis and Alex Jones rants. But if we woke up tomorrow and FB or YouTube started deleting content…
Increasingly, that's representative of the US population writ large.
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I love the unspoken sentiment behind your experience. "I took to facebook to post links to grey legal documents rather than hosting them myself because I wanted facebook to be liable; Im shocked when they told me they didn't appreciate the transfer of risk. It's literally censorship I tell you!" Freedom of speech is not, and hopefully never will be,"freedom to post on other people's servers unmoderated".
Freedom of speech is a much larger broader concept than the First Amendment. Consider for a second if some political position was banned by all privately owned mediums in the US. Say for example it was reported on the violence is Bangladesh. Every internet provider would stop transferring data if it detected any mention of it, every server hosting data in any format would immediately remove any mention of it, Microso…
It's a regressive part of this epoch of human history that the opposite is true of free speech: companies are required by law to surveil and censor.
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I love the unspoken sentiment behind your experience. "I took to facebook to post links to grey legal documents rather than hosting them myself because I wanted facebook to be liable; Im shocked when they told me they didn't appreciate the transfer of risk. It's literally censorship I tell you!" Freedom of speech is not, and hopefully never will be,"freedom to post on other people's servers unmoderated".
> It's literally censorship I tell you! It literally is. Most people would say that is justifiable given that Facebook owns the platform, but that dosen't change the fact that they're censoring what users say.
Those supporting censorship make basic references to it being okay because it is legal.
Those opposed to censorship make basic references to it being wrong because it is unethical.
Clearly, there is a tension between what is legal and what is ethical.
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At least for me, the freedoms enshrined in the bill of rights and other amendments are valuable not just as restrictions on government power, but as restrictions on power. The more asymmetric the relationship between two parties, the more sensitive we become to exercises of power by the stronger party over the weaker one. I think that we do have a reasonable expectation that our employers and service providers won't…
You can want the Bill of Rights to be "restrictions on power", but as a positive description of reality and of law, they are not that . In fact: the Constitution had to be amended to make those rights binding on State governments, and it's not perfectly legally clear that all of those rights have been so incorporated. The idea that they bind on Facebook is... aspirational.
I'm going to steal that phrase.
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The Guardian was also forced to destroy copies of the files it owned by the UK government.
Because the UK government has a censorship program that prevented journalists from reporting on source material relevant to the interests of their citizens.
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Because the UK government has a censorship program that prevented journalists from reporting on source material relevant to the interests of their citizens.
An example of Snowden documents being legally grey, and even the example of the guardian being under pressure because of it.
Imagine if some Saudi documents were leaked to journalists and the American government walked into the Times and forced them to destroy the documents at gunpoint.
This was clear and simple government censorship.
Not particularly unusual or remarkable for the UK.
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At least for me, the freedoms enshrined in the bill of rights and other amendments are valuable not just as restrictions on government power, but as restrictions on power. The more asymmetric the relationship between two parties, the more sensitive we become to exercises of power by the stronger party over the weaker one. I think that we do have a reasonable expectation that our employers and service providers won't…
You can want the Bill of Rights to be "restrictions on power", but as a positive description of reality and of law, they are not that . In fact: the Constitution had to be amended to make those rights binding on State governments, and it's not perfectly legally clear that all of those rights have been so incorporated. The idea that they bind on Facebook is... aspirational.
The Bill of Rights and later amendments enshrines the ideal that power should have limitations. Just because this ideal was first applied to government doesn't mean that we must stop there.
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You can want the Bill of Rights to be "restrictions on power", but as a positive description of reality and of law, they are not that . In fact: the Constitution had to be amended to make those rights binding on State governments, and it's not perfectly legally clear that all of those rights have been so incorporated. The idea that they bind on Facebook is... aspirational.
Its not a matter of what their legal status is. Its a matter of what drives our sense of whether some behavior is right or wrong. The Bill of Rights and later amendments enshrines the ideal that power should have limitations. Just because this ideal was first applied to government doesn't mean that we must stop there.