Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

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>imagine a world where women who advocate for suffrage and women's rights are [...], rejected from conferences

Your expanded idea of free speech is noble but it's not possible for society to provide.

Free speech allowed by the government is possible.

Free speech hosted and paid for by private commercial entities is impossible -- in any long-term sustaining way.

The "free speech on commercial entities" would require 2 extra draconian laws that citizens would never agree to:

1) a law to force private entities to pay for speech they disagree with on their private platforms and in their private conferences even if that opposing speech causes them to lose the funding that allows for them to pay for it in the first place.

2) a law to force web surfers' eyeballs[1] to view content they don't agree with, and force people to buy tickets to conferences with speakers they don't want to hear

Free speech with private commercial entities creates a contradiction of priorities. I've written about this impossibility before.[2]

To make it relate to HN readers, imagine after creating a Digital Ocean account and paying $9/month for VPS to host a blog about photography or enthusiast forum about cars, you must now pay for opinion pieces about Trump or Clinton (whichever you disagree with). The draconian law requires you pay for it because nobody's opinion is allowed to be marginalized. Also, the web users visiting that new site are required to show video proof (maybe via iPhone/Android camera) that they've read the marginalized opinions. (To satisfy the proverbial "if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" ... if no visitors go to the web page and read it, it's effectively not free speech.)

[1] Ludovico technique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(film)#/med...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12158682

I didn't advocate creating any laws. I was simply describing a concept that goes beyond congress.

However, lets roll with your thought experiment. Lets consider a variation of "equal rights" that applies to more than just the government - say it also applied to lending. It would require 2 extra draconian laws:

1) A law to force private entities to associate with people they dislike, even if that association causes to lose money.

2) A law to force some borrowers to pay higher interest rates to subsidize the defaults of others.

Actually these draconian laws exist and are not particularly controversial at all (though they certainly were in the past). I'm curious to know what you think about it.

Which laws are those?

ECOA and FHA act, among others.

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

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

Surrounding these laws is a bunch of regulation and agency interpretation - i.e. if an agency doesn't like your lending/free association choices they'll hit you with lawsuits/regulatory actions that are themselves very punishing.

As a concrete example, see Figure 7 of this paper. This figure shows that lenders could avoid a lot of defaults if they did per-race isotonic regression on FICO scores. In non-technical terms, this means a black person with a FICO score of 600 is more likely to default than an Asian person with the same score, and this information is easy to use. However, lenders are legally forbidden from using this information; as a result, lenders must associate with people (potential defaulters) that they don't want to and Asian people must pay higher interest rates because of this.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-wQVEjH9yuhanpyQjUwQS1JOTQ...

Not everything has to be a law. For example, one could imagine a world where the social norm was that services embodied some more generalized idea of free speech, and people are reluctant to use services that don't do this because one day it's likely to be used against them. Instead, the press are pushing the opposite social norm, that sites are somehow morally obligated to restrict speech: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/social-media-companies-are-...

>For example, one could imagine a world where the social norm was that services embodied some more generalized idea of free speech, and people are reluctant to use services that don't do this because one day it's likely to be used against them.

Ok, I'm having trouble parsing what you wrote. I also looked at your link to see how it relates.

Tell me if I interpreted your hypothetical scenario correctly:

Suppose we have website called OrganicMothers.com that focuses on things like mothers breastfeeding their infants, growing veggies in the back yard and using a blender to pulverize it into homemade baby food. That website has heavy censoring against posts about artificial foods, or alternative viewpoints about synthetic breast milk, or messages with a disrespectful tone.

Another website is AnythingGoesMothering.com allows any writings including chemical additives and all profanity and insults are uncensored.

You're saying that a future societal norm could be where a mother who avoided AnythingGoesMothering.com because it had too many messages saying "any mother who doesn't feed her baby Monsanto's patented baby milk instead of breastmilk is a stupid c-nt!" ... will be denied a job and/or shunned from dinner parties?

Remember that "free speech" includes everything from the cess pool. Basically all text is allowed short of doxxing people's social security numbers.

I just don't see your hypothetical becoming the norm.

Honestly, I was more thinking about the layer of abstraction above individual communities like OrganicMothers.com and AnythingGoesMothering.com - the one made up of shared services like Reddit and Facebook that are used to establish communities, since they're harder to avoid. But even at that level, speech-restrictive websites can certainly be worrying. For example, anti-vaccination ideas are likely to be popular with your hypothetical organic mothering community, and obviously they are also likely to attract a lot of anger. So the community would certainly be a lot friendlier if they banned criticism of mothers' choices not to vaccinate their kids. Can you perhaps see how this might not be socially desirable?

>be a lot friendlier if they banned criticism of mothers' choices not to vaccinate their kids. Can you perhaps see how this might not be socially desirable?

Yes I do, but only because you cherry-picked an example that seems to be an obvious benefit.

I want to emphasize again that true free speech includes everything you don't like and all stupid opinions so you can't isolate good examples and ignore bad ones.

You cannot isolate good and bad examples of censorship that easily either, because it denies users information on what information they're being denied. This hypothetical site is hardly going to tell users that it's hiding the fact they're killing their babies from them; it's more likely to frame it as protecting them from industry propaganda, exactly as you argued they should be allowed to. It's only from the outside perspective that this is obviously terrible.

(This is, in my experience, a general principle of site-based censorship. For example, if I had a dollar for every regular of every feminist community who was sure the site moderators were protecting them from the oppressor, when actually they were protecting the site owners from criticism and dissent by women more oppressed than them who they were rather spectacularly failing to represent...)

>Suppose we have website called OrganicMothers.com that focuses on things like mothers breastfeeding their infants, growing veggies in the back yard and using a blender to pulverize it into homemade baby food. That website has heavy censoring against posts about artificial foods, or alternative viewpoints about synthetic breast milk, or messages with a disrespectful tone.

Indeed these sort of communities actually require "heavy censorship" to remain functional and on topic otherwise it enviably would be overrun with trolls or people "looking to debate." It actually cannot be prevented without moderation. Without moderation the internet is not functional for the majority of users.

Anyways, any form of moderation at all, even removing spam and off topic posts is "censorship." Commercial speech is also speech so removing spam is "restricting freedom of speech." (not that I think "freedom of speech" is applicable to private websites, because that's silly)

> 1) Private entities must pay for speech they disagree with on their private platforms and in their private conferences even if that opposing speech causes them to lose the funding that allows for them to pay for it in the first place.

Just thinking about your point (1), I'm not sure it is impossible, depending on the industry. Isn't it just the straightforward position for most companies that are considered common carriers - they can't discriminate?

>Isn't it just the straightforward position for most companies that are considered common carriers - they can't discriminate?

(For more about that won't work, see my previous comment I linked in the footnote.)

It wouldn't make any sense for the government to forcefully reclassify a company like Facebook as a "common carrier"[1] like a telecommunications provider because FB is sponsored by advertisers. The ISPs (with subscribers) can be common carriers but not websites (with ad sponsors).

A "common carrier" designation from the government doesn't come with a $20 billion payment to Facebook from the government (taxpayers) to make up for loss of advertisers pulling their ad dollars on platform that allows speech they don't like.

Likewise, since "common carrier" doesn't mean users are forced keep their Facebook accounts and forced to read newsfeeds of opinions they disagree with, it doesn't solve the problem.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier#Telecommunicati...

1) The fact that they're paying for speech they disagree with isn't necessarily bad for business. Whether it causes them to lose funding/revenue is a business problem that doesn't seem inherently unsolvable. Does reddit increase or shrink their ad revenue when they decide to drop a controversial subreddit? To take the example in your other post, there's probably a bunch of offensive groups on Facebook. Does P&G threaten to stop advertising on FB? What about non-ad-based revenue models?

2) Not sure why that follows at all.

>2) Not sure why that follows at all.

Because marginalized or fringe opinions already have freedom of speech at the level of ICANN DNS (get a domain name) and the ISP (pay for internet connection and virtual server to host webpages). E.g., if you really really really want to write a webpage about the benefits of child sex, you can get a domain called ChildSexIsGood.com. Host your controversial content (text not pics) there. You don't need Facebook to "approve" of your fringe content. There, you already have "freedom of speech" -- and you've had that autonomy for decades before Facebook/reddit came into existence. You still have that uncensored publishing power on DNS+ISP now.

But that's not good enough because marginalized voices also want an audience. Registering a new domain name doesn't mean you have web visitors. Without the audience, it's not "really free speech."

>What about non-ad-based revenue models?

Nobody has come up with a way for people to pay for websites with opinions they don't want to read.

Consider how hard it is for The New York Times and WSJ to entice people to pay for stories they do want to read.

1) But free speech doesn't entitle you to an audience? Not sure why you're making that leap. It's free speech regardless of the existence of an audience.

2) Sure. And people read the fraction of the NYT they do want to read. And they pay for the part they don't want to read too, because it is happily packaged with the rest. There could also be other business models that involve other third parties than advertisers. Who knows?

Edit: Engrish.

>Not sure why you're making that leap. It's free speech regardless of the existence of an audience.

To clarify, I'm arguing the way others argue so if doesn't seem logical to you, I totally agree!

When you tell people who are censored on places like Facebook to just go make their own website, they'll respond with the analogy: "freedom to shout opinions in my own living room where nobody else can hear it is NOT FREE SPEECH!"

Using that logic, that's why they insist putting the "public space" label on Facebook/reddit/twitter. It's not good enough that DNS+ISP is the "public space". Instead, it must be somebody else's website that already has an audience of millions.

> citizens would never agree to

From the perspective of your elected officials, apathy is agreement.

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