> Apparently they missed Ron Wyden (co-sponsor) of the bill is a Democrat and the bill is a bi-partisan effort?

And thank god for that. I hope this is indicative of a larger trend in the opposite direction.

I'm not in the US, but here too free speech and other democratic values have been something the far right could contrast themselves on against the center and left. It pisses me off to no end that the issues I've been harping on about for years are now most effectively championed by a group that is otherwise ideologically opposed to me. I'm not mad at the right for this, I'm mad at the center and left who handed it to them.

Who are you referring to? At the time I'm replying to this, there are 4 other top-level comments on this thread, and the only one even implying that it was a partisan effort was someone mentioning the "current regime" in a joking sort of way. Everyone knows that Liberals also want to limit free speech. That's not new.

Huh? We have more free speech than ever online at this moment. The last regime colluded with the major social media companies to censor people they didn't like and it's also recently come to light that they attempted to get the Joe Rogan/Spotify deal nuked, all based on censoring speech they don't like.

The liberal government of the UK is moving toward complete online censorship with their bill to prevent children from going on social media sites. The reality is that they will now be able to identify and will arrest people for posting opinions they don't like. This has already been happening for the last couple of years and will now be even easier. This is exactly how it works in China.

If Democrats come into power again in the US, this will soon be coming to a computer near you.

This should be the #1 story on HN, but the tech community has been strangely silent on the subject....

I just wish the people claiming to be champions of free speech and rights will just admit that this all goes out the window when it applies to speech and people you don't like. It would make everything much easier.

> Big Social Media firms have to make decisions on speech.

The fiction underlying their section 230 liability shield is that they don’t have to make those decisions. They’re just “dumb pipes” for user generated content. The Supreme Court punted on this issue in Twitter v. Taamneh but it’s going to get resolved eventually.

This bill is about enhancing the protections of lawful free-speech under the US constitution.

Generally speaking, we deem various kinds of speech that harms people as NOT protected under the first amendment, and that kind of speech would not be protected here.

Yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, libel and slander, speech calling for violence, and fraudulent advertising are some typical examples of speech not protected by the first amendment.

It would be tricky, but we could reasonably categorize engagement algorithms with certain properties as harmful to people and not subject to first amendment protections. This would be consumer protection, like laws against fraudulent advertising and other misleading claims.

No need to square the circle when it’s already a hexagon. Commies can’t stand hexagons.

> But everyone here loves jawboning and agrees the government should suppress speech.

That sure is quite an assumption you're making.

Governments should have zero control over speech and zero ability to impose consequences on speech. Individuals and most groups should have absolute freedom of association, which is precisely what they're exercising when choosing not to associate with some speech and some speakers

What are those things? Googling didn’t help.

Obviously censorship of both the location of ICE agents (or other terrorist threats bearing state decals) and censorship of discourse over the science of respiratory pathogens has been awful; I don't recall anyone here on HN cheerleading either of them.

In fact, it seems to me that you've chosen precisely two areas between which a palpable bridge exists, contradicting the two-party zeitgeist.

HN, for all its many flaws, is one of the few places where important evidence such as the diamond princess dataset and the cochrane review of evidence of mask (in)efficacy received robust discussion and, seemingly, resulted in changed minds.

Likewise, I don't recall anyone but a few trolls suggesting that Apple's assistance to ICE in covering its tracks was a legitimate exercise of state (to the extent that pressure was a factor) or corporate (to the extent that it created market esteem) pressure.