freedom of speech just means the government can't create laws to censor you. free speech is not free from repercussions and it's also not guaranteed by private companies.
> freedom of speech just means the government can't create laws to censor you.
No, it absolutely doesn't. You're confusing Freedom of Speech with the 1st Amendment, which is a single instantiation of the value of Freedom of Speech.
Yes but a private company has absolutely no requirement to provide you with free speech forum.
Also Freedom of Speech is nothing if it is not somehow enshrined in law. There is no universal freedom of speech, like gravity or the speed of light. Freedom of Speech is whatever is detailed in law, so the 1st Amendment is probably the best example of it however. It allows hate speech (if you dont call for violence), because you can be free to express your opinions without the government shutting you down or arresting you. But that protection does not mean others cannot avoid you or withdraw services from you if they diagree with you.
I used to think this same thing until fairly recently. I made arguments that "it's not your website" meant that they didn't have a responsibility to uphold restrictions aimed at government.
I now think this is an incorrect view. Freedom of Speech is a societal value, and yes, the First Amendment is where the U.S. holds its governments to the standard. But if it is a value first, before it is a law, then we really ought to expect more from what is rapidly becoming our primary form of discourse.
We should value Freedom of Speech wherever speech occurs. I'd argue that these days, especially in a pandemic, the majority of our ideas get exchanged over the internet, in forums, on Facebook, on Twitter, and not in the public square or in newspapers. Holding that Free Speech is required for a free society, requires that we should expect its protection even when the venue changes.
The government must not censor. But we ought to hold private companies who monetize public discourse to the standards we value. Whether those requirements, those values, require laws applicable to these new venues is separate debate, and definitely worth having.
We really ought to require that these companies should not silence or censor someone speaking their mind.
I lived in China for 5 years, most of the time in Xinjiang, and is sad how the media manipulates people in the west, you clearly have never been in XinJiang or in China at all. You can believe whatever you want and I'm sure most readers here will support you, because like you , they have been deceived. What is happening in Hong Kong is sad, I agree with you there, and something should be done by the US and their allies.But, Uighurs are one of the 56 ethnics groups of China, like Mongolians, Weiwer, ... not a nationality, and not the only Muslim ethnic group, there is no concentration camps or anything like that. Sorry. There are Uighurs terrorists in prison after the bomb car exploded in TianAnMen and the incident in Kunming's train station in 2013, that you probably dont know about, in the same way the US have Iraqis and afghans in Guantanamo... just because..... Good luck with your campaign, I'm sure people with join you and think you are the coolest guy in HN today. But I had to break it up to you... sorry
It is whataboutism, but the U.S. is guilty of a lot of similar things that China is, not as bad in most cases, but I think it's fair to compare the Uyghurs to Guantanamo, the way we're treating immigrants at the border, or how discriminatory our justice system is towards black people.
We have a higher percentage of people in jail then China by a lot (5x). Many of them are in jail for political/racial reasons (the Drug War, Immigration).
We have the NSA spying on all of us. As well as Google, FB, etc.
We treat our protestors horribly as well, look at what the FBI did to black rights protesters or look at how the Dakota Access pipeline protesters were treated.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with Drew on this article, and I'd support a boycott, but in the words of someone I'm not a fan of: "Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world."
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." [1]
Crack cocaine carried a much harsher sentence then Cocaine, a law that very clearly targeted black people. [2]
Marijuana use is the same between white and black people, but black people are 3.73x more likely to be arrested for it.[3]
[1] Plenty of countries with homogenous populations have harsh drug laws, so it hardly seems like that was the only consideration, if at all. After all, Prohibition in the US happened a long time before 1968, and alcohol is arguably less destructive than heroin, and nobody was targeting hippies or black people with a ban on alcohol.
[3] Black people getting arrested at a higher rate doesn't make the policies racist. It either makes the cops racist (possible) or it means that there are other factors beyond skin color that are affecting the stats (most likely explanation).
I made a remark about the author(s) of Notepad++ naming his release "Free Uyghur", quite unpopular I would say, I meant it to be like that, I told him/them that Uyghurs are just a ethnic group of China, not a nation, etc... But in this case , bloating someone's project for political reason's is just plain wrong, is awful. Github should have something in place to protect open source projects against something like this.
Why is it wrong? It's quite courageous of them to support human rights, and they have the right to do so, especially when they have been developing and giving away their software for free. You have no obligation to use it.
Also, If they are "just an ethnic group", then why are so many being sent to prison? Why the mass surveillance, restrictions, arrests and 're-education' camps?
"Free Uyghur" doesn't necessarily mean they should be given their own nation, but at least be able to practice their culture and religion freely.
Thank you. Somehow is cool this days to write non-sense in tech forums. The Kurds are also a large ethnic group in Turkey, so is the author of Notepad++ will be adding a mention to them in the next release note? Native Americans in the US and Canada? Buryats in Russia? and the list goes on and on... but hey, I guess is too hard to do a little research before pretending to be cool.
"Somehow is cool this days to write non-sense in tech forums."
- Yes, that's what you are doing. Are about 1+ million of those groups you mentioned in concentration camps for just being from that group? No, so don't make such absurd comparisons.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, and please don't break the site guideline against insinuations about astroturfing in threads. That's a major rule users need to follow here—otherwise the threads deteriorate severely.
Yup, hating China is cool these days... people that have never been there nor understand the language or the culture are the ones that share all of this non-sense.
There is plenty of legitimate criticism to be made of the resurgence of Chinese nationalism - just as there is for American and Russian nationalism.
“Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer
And, we criticize American and Russian nationalism here. Why can't we criticize Chinese nationalism?
(And, yes, there is danger of painting with too broad a brush, no matter which nation's nationalism we are criticizing. Not everyone there is a nationalist, for any value of "there".)
Since when is criticizing a national government or it's policies == hating an entire country? Not to mention the author was born and raised in China... I would also be careful in raising the assumption that most people reading FP (or for that matter HN) have never been to or lived in China.
