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0 pointsbashinator4y ago0 comments

Not at all. Google is a private concern with the right to publish or not any content they see fit. That they can defacto censor opinions they don’t approve of is a failure of the market.

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dmix4y ago

It’s funny how “as long as you can = you should” works here for Google et al but we’d never apply that logic to a million other social issues we have.

choward4y ago

This argument is only valid if the government wasn't pressuring Google. Because they are Google can now use it as an excuse to censor whatever it wants. The government also has big contracts with Google so they can use that as leverage too. This is another form of government censorship that actually benefits Google. The government and Google are both at fault.

bashinatorOP4y ago

The government would not be able to bring that pressure to bear if YouTube, g-suite, and Google cloud weren’t all the same company, and if there were a competitive market for internet video distribution.

hammock4y ago

My point was that YouTube seems prefer to erase historical events rather than promote a favored narrative of those events. That's interesting to me.

All this hub about right to publish is a non sequitur.

erichocean4y ago

Corporations do not have rights, they are government-defined entities—not people. There's no "Bill of Corporate Rights" or "UN Convention on Corporate Rights."

Corporations have locally-defined privileges and exist by, and at, the will of the people where they reside. Governments can change what those privileges are at any moment, for any reason—or no reason at all.

If we don't like what Google is doing, we can simply write laws regulating it differently.

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In reply:

> "In a U.S. historical context, the phrase "corporate personhood" refers to the ongoing legal debate over the extent to which rights traditionally associated with natural persons should also be afforded to corporations."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

Hint: ongoing legal debate, i.e. it's up to government to decide what "corporate personhood" means—exactly what I am saying. It's up to government, not "inalienable" or "natural" or whatever.

It's a purely legal question whether trillion dollar corporate mega-platforms with billions of users have the same regulations and responsibilities as widows and orphans. We don't have to let the Googles and Facebooks and Amazons and YouTubes of the world trample on basic human rights "because ackshually, corporations are people too." Certainly nothing about the 14th Amendment requires it.

krapp4y ago

Corporations do have rights, including the right to free speech and association, because even as entities they are not separable from the people (or the rights of the people) who create and interact with them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

>Government can change what those privileges are at any moment, for any reason—or no reason at all.

No, this isn't the way government works anywhere outside of a dictatorship.

webmaven4y ago

> >Government can change what those privileges are at any moment, for any reason—or no reason at all.

> No, this isn't the way government works anywhere outside of a dictatorship.

It really is. The executive branch is the most constrained in practice, but the legislative branch is relatively free to do whatever they want (spend money, create or abolish departments, set the rules, change the rules, allocate money to enforce the rules, etc. Even revise their own deliberative procedures), and the judiciary is even less constrained except that it is the other two branches that control who gets appointed as judges.

There are checks and balances, but those are pretty much always another part of government, so ultimately, anything the three branches agree on gets done. Anything.

There might be consequences including failing to get reelected for the executive and legislature, but that doesn't necessarily undo what's already been done.

jmalicki4y ago

Corporations are people, at least within the United States [1], with all rights available to (groups of) individuals. Just not natural people.

[1] https://www.history.com/news/14th-amendment-corporate-person...

cobbzilla4y ago

“Compared with other entities, the average corporation is considered about as similar to a person as an ant.”

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00100...

michaelmrose4y ago

The government cannot easily remove the rights of the individuals who make up said corporations without going through the cumbersome and probably impossible process of amending the constitution.

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