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Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

Hate-speech can be tricky. There are edge cases where what is "true" can be hard to determine. But in a large proportion of cases veracity is easy to determine.

Are you suggesting that we just throw up out hands and say "there's really no point trying to determine what is a fact, these days?"

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>Are you suggesting that we just throw up out hands and say "there's really no point trying to determine what is a fact, these days?"

I'm saying it's not Google's job to determine what is a fact.

Was a reporter denying WMDs in 2003 a fact or "false news"?

Was Garry Web [1] a writer of facts or a fake news spreader?

The answers were much less clear at the time, and the established press and media/internet overlords would have labeled both fake news and be done with it...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb

I don't know why this seems to be so hard for people to understand. We already have, very effective I might add, laws that tackle grey areas. The entire notion of "due diligence" in business is this exactly. As a business you have to prove that you did all that a "reasonable" (deliberately vague to allow the term to grow as technology does) entity would to follow the law.

Suddenly the idea of "fake news" isn't so murky. A reporter doing his/her due diligence in 2003 could have concluded there were wmds in Iraq, a reporter in 2017 that says the same is a hawker of fake news. It's not a hard bar to apply, especially to the most grievous offenders today (the Breitbarts and Huffington posts of the world for example).

There's no overlord trying to hide the conspiracies of the world, it's just bringing a much needed regulation to the news, as essential component to the modern democracy.

> There's no overlord trying to hide the conspiracies of the world, it's just bringing a much needed regulation to the news, as essential component to the modern democracy.

Who defines 'reasonable' when 'news' is inherently opinionated? The one with the deepest pockets for legal protection?

Who says that only 'businesses' are and should be the ones reporting news?

And who regulates the regulators?

Seriously.. EFF v ATT, for starters, along with any of the entirely half baked 1-sided, spin-laden 'real news' that is coming out of just about any major entity these days..

>A reporter doing his/her due diligence in 2003 could have concluded there were wmds in Iraq

That's what I'm afraid of. Google doing the same kind of BS "due diligence" and then forbidding counter opinions (the equivalent of "no WMDs" in 2003) as fake news.

>There's no overlord trying to hide the conspiracies of the world

No, just many private interests that treat each other well...

Baseless claims, even if they somehow turn out to be right, are still baseless and add little but information to a discussion. This insistence that every thing is abstract and thus all "opinions" are equally valid is how we got in this mess to begin with. No matter how many neonazis shout it, there's no evidence to suggest their claims of racial superiority, no matter how many times it got repeated on fucking national tv there is no evidence Planned Parenthood harvest the organs of fetuses, every image macro doesn't have to necessarily match the caption no matter what Tumblr might claim, and not matter how much money Exon spends there's mountains of data suggesting anthropomorphic climate change.

If you opinion is so unsupported that it fails basic due diligence, it shouldn't be appearing with equal weight to the supported thought. And we should continue to hold aggregators responsible for letting that shit filter to the top. Googling "food that cures cancer" should result in "No food cures cancer go talk to your oncologist" not "list of top ten super foods" from blogspam site number N; Googling "did the Holocaust happen" should result in "yes" not a link to stormfront.

I agree there certainly is a grey area when deciding on public "fact" in developing issues or contriversal subjects; but there are plenty of things far and away from that grey area and to pretend they aren't is worse than censorship. By treating valid information with the same weight as invalid information you've removed people's ability to find the facts even more effectively than if you tried to censor them (given how terrible attempts at censorship have been in the past, I wouldn't be surprised to see tyrants move to this form of information suppression).

As I say - there are edge cases.

> Hate-speech can be tricky.

It seems pretty clear to me. Hate speech is free speech.

Sure, and a private company isn't obligated to present it.

I have no problem with this as long as the company is being honest with what they're doing and why.

A honest company?

Yes indeed. There are many. I would even guestimate that most of them are honest.

Nor is a government. But the founders thought the principle of free-speech was a good one and so we have the 1st amendment.

With the 1st amendment, the government can never censor (with a few exceptions)... however companies can censor whatever they want for whatever reason they want, perhaps ironically, as an expression of freedom of speech.

I'm aware. My point was that the founders of the US Government chose to uphold the principle of free speech. The founders of companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter chose not to.

I see. Your point is that the principle of free speech is something different than the 1st amendment and the authors of the amendment messed up and allowed a loophole.

I think that if a company has enough of a monopoly on information that they become a de-facto governing agency, that they should be forced to uphold the principles of the 1st amendment.

Facebook should be classified as something like a common carrier.

I understand now, and it's hard not to agree with that perspective.

On the other hand, because of the fundamental relationship of the free press and health of democracy, shouldn't there be some kind of criteria for validity the same way that health claims in advertising do, for example? I understand that some things are subjective and impossible to apply criteria to, but what about cases where people are knowingly publishing demonstrable falsehoods to mislead masses of people. Seems like a major problem. Btw, im not sure what my opinion is on this.... Im just "devil advocating", I guess.

EDIT:/foundational/fundamental Im having a hard time with words today. :/

I honestly don't know. I think in general though, we should try to make information be as available as possible. Most of the justification for regulations about communications content comes from a time when most people had only three television channels, and a few newspapers.

Also, China has used exactly the same justification for censoring their information. And they're not wrong. People do knowingly spread misinformation and harm others.

I think that it's a really tempting problem to want to solve. If we could just find some heuristic to know for certain that something was "fake", we'd have it all figured out.

Yes, and I consider that a limitation of the 1st amendment rather than something to celebrate.

Companies above a certain size, should be forced to be open platforms for everybody and everything (as long as its within the law).

Same concept as with net neutrality.

So is yelling fire in a movie theater, then.

Idiot much?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

all the time fucko

Not in a lot of places, e.g., Canada and Germany, to name two off the top of my head...

(And for the record, I'd happily vote to place additional restrictions on hate speech in the U.S., following the models presented by those two countries. I'm simply not afraid of the slippery slope arguments that people bring up; I think they're fallacious.)

Yeah, what issue could there be from additional restrictions on "hate speech" in a country with litigation happy fundamentalist christians on one side and "freedom fighters" on the other each considering their own BS ideas of hate speech. With a history of red scare and McCarthyism and other such niceties to top.

Boy you misinterpreted that one.

He's saying it's dangerous as fuck to let anyone determine what is appropriate to say and what is not appropriate to say.

When you're talking about infrastructure fundamental to everyone's life determining what can be communicated you're talking about building 95% of the infrastructure of tyranny in one fell swoop.

Do you think the government or the officers of Alphabet will always be Good people that you agree with? History is rife with examples of awful people taking over once-benevolent powerful institutions.

I think it is dangerous as well. Alphabet has shown to more interested in political power than principles.

From Eric directly being involved in the clinton campaign. https://qz.com/823922/eric-schmidt-played-a-crucial-role-in-... http://www.googletransparencyproject.org/articles/googles-su...

And now google donating money to Trump. http://dailycaller.com/2017/04/21/google-donated-285000-to-t...

Plus we know the amount of pressure PRISM and the other intelligence agencies can put on Silicon Valley companies.

Do you really think that, say "flat earth" people, who do little harm, should be removed from the Internet? What about people who believe in Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster? Or UFOlogists?

There are things that are obviously false, but probably harmless enough.

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