Please feel free to point us to the evidence of HN howling with outrage about the chilling consequences of our digital overlords succumbing to activist and advertiser presssure to ban porn (and presumed porn) on their platforms. When Tumblr banned porn, the general reaction was "lol, they're not going to have any audience left" and the one person that raised it as a speech violation (as opposed to a bit of a shame for kinky people) was downvoted to nothingness.[1]
Compare and contrast with how this thread, instead of focusing on "lol, algorithms and context!" has turned into questioning whether the real problem is advertisers signalling they don't want to attach their brand to racist videos (and let's not get started on how angry much of HN was when companies decided to manually enforce policies against hate speech). It's difficult to conclude that most US "free speech" advocates don't believe that banning [perceived] racial hatred is somehow more dangerous to humanity than banning [perceived] adult content (which parallels Supreme Court rulings on what speech does and doesn't deserve protection). Given the respective consequences of racial hatred and pornography, I see this simultaneous presumption in favour of the former and against the latter as very hard to justify.
Compare and contrast with how this thread, instead of focusing on "lol, algorithms and context!" has turned into questioning whether the real problem is advertisers signalling they don't want to attach their brand to racist videos (and let's not get started on how angry much of HN was when companies decided to manually enforce policies against hate speech). It's difficult to conclude that most US "free speech" advocates don't believe that banning [perceived] racial hatred is somehow more dangerous to humanity than banning [perceived] adult content (which parallels Supreme Court rulings on what speech does and doesn't deserve protection). Given the respective consequences of racial hatred and pornography, I see this simultaneous presumption in favour of the former and against the latter as very hard to justify.
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26218476