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0 pointsSturgeonsLaw4y ago0 comments

So you can sit around in your new subreddit with enough subscribers that you can count them on your fingers, posting freely, while /r/politics (or wherever) has a subscriber base measured in millions.

Reminds me a bit of the "free speech zones". It's a poor facsimile of true freedom of speech.

Seeing as the new public squares are, by and large, digital spaces controlled by megacorps, we need to expand the first amendment to apply to private enterprise.

0 comments

Godel_unicode4y ago

Freedom of speech is not the same thing as requirement that others listen. If someone has no audience, with all the platforms that are available, it's not because they're being censored. It's because nobody cares what they have to say.

josephcsible4y ago

It's not that nobody wants to listen. There are plenty of people who want to listen, but the megacorps refuse to let the talkers and listeners connect.

fallingknife4y ago

This is not what is happening on these platforms. r/thedonald had millions of subscribers and not a single one was forced to listen. Then it was banned by reddit for thoughtcrime.

skinnymuch4y ago

You could have brought up hard left subreddits getting banned too. Like Chapo. So it doesn’t seem like only the right is persecuted/appearing to continue the trope of how the right are such victims.

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Eelongate4y ago

> So you can sit around in your new subreddit with enough subscribers that you can count them on your fingers, posting freely, while /r/politics (or wherever) has a subscriber base measured in millions.

And if by some chance your subreddit manages to become popular, the admins and power mods will conspire to take it from you. Reddit sucks.

Covzire4y ago

There's something akin to a law of nature at work on Reddit that goes something like this: Any sub-reddit (or it's topic-at-hand) that garners any national attention in the political sphere will become an echo chamber full of corporate shills unless there is constant and public vigilance to guard against it, and even then the sub's chances for surviving to fulfill its original mission is grim. I f'ing hate what Reddit has become.

the_why_of_y4y ago

The first amendment of the US constitution does apply to private enterprise. This is why Congress cannot make a law that limits private enterprises' editing of third party content on the platforms they own.

What you are arguing for requires either an amendment to the constitution or nationalization of those private enterprises.

vkou4y ago

Freedom of speech is exactly how you get r/politics, private propaganda syndicates, and qanonsense screaming loud enough that it drowns out everything else.

"More" of it isn't going to make any of those things go away.

"Freedom of speech" isn't a guarantee that your prefered brand of rational discourse is going to have an audience of millions. If anything, it's a guarantee that it won't, because someone with a self-serving profit motive is far more incentivized to shout over you.

Freedom of speech does not entitle you to broadcast to anyone else's audience.

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