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Comment by Cenk | Hacker News Reader

As someone who grew up in Germany I can tell you that banning some hate speech does most certainly not lead to "anything remotely questionable getting deleted/flagged". Holocaust denial and racism are not normal political views, and pretending otherwise is disingenuous.

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While I agree with your sentiment -now-, it is a slippery slope. As recent as what...50 or so years ago, racism was a 'normal political view' so to speak, in USA at least...depending on your definition of normal. What's to say that someone in 2070 saying 'Speaking out against communism and AI leadership are not normal political views'. Normal is always going to be a 'moving target', and banning everything outside of 'normal' doesn't seem conducive to a free environment.

There’s a false dichotomy here between the status quo and banning ads. My preference is for letting anyone run whatever, provided it must be publically accessible for anyone else to view and debunk. Political ads before the Internet weren’t necessarily more honest. Their dishonesty was just more-openly debated.

I’m not dead set on this proposal (if one can call it that). I was hoping for that discussion more than this cake or death.

But nobody is suggesting banning "everything outside of normal". This is not an all-or-nothing proposition, there’s no reason for the slope to be slippery. You can ban holocaust denial and nothing else, or ban hate speech that fits a very specific set of criteria.

Did banning shouting "Fire!" in a movie theatre lead to all speech being banned in all movie theatres?

If only.

> Did banning shouting "Fire!" in a movie theatre lead to all speech being banned in all movie theatres?

No, it led to people calling for the resistance to the WWI draft being imprisoned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

> This is not an all-or-nothing proposition, there’s no reason for the slope to be slippery.

I think that if you draft your country's constitution to say, "We have freedom of speech, except for calling for genocide and/or denying the Holocaust," then that can work reasonably well, and it won't necessarily turn into a broader ban. If you actually write a short list of exceptions into your constitution, then that can work.

But the US constitution isn't written that way. We have very broad freedom of speech, and the only way to curtail it is via the Supreme Court deciding that certain kinds of speech are somehow an exception to rules. Libel and slander are, of course, exceptions, but they're ancient ones with a lot of case law explaining exactly what's forbidden. There are other exceptions, mostly involving things like angry mobs.

But if you want to start saying, "This speech is forbidden because it promotes bad ideas," then you need to fundamentally change how the Supreme Court interprets the first amendment. And once we go there, then we have no idea where we're going to wind up.

> Did banning shouting "Fire!" in a movie theatre lead to all speech being banned in all movie theatres?

No, because we never banned shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater; the idea that such a thing was unprotected speech which could be banned is non-authoritative dicta from a Supreme Court ruling which did, however, uphold he criminalization of core political speech in the form of protests against the WWI draft, which has since been overturned and is widely recognized as a major failure when it comes to free speech. Which was worse than a content-neutral ban on all speech in theaters.

Shouting "Fire!" isn't hate speech, it's basically a kind of social fraud: as a member of society, if you scream that some emergency is happening there is an expectation that such an emergency actually exists or could have been believed to exist. Especially in a case like this where the response is likely to injur people.

Free speech is about being able to state your oppinion. The person shouldn't "Fire!" in your example doesn't have the oppinion that there is a fire.

There are no easy answers like 'just allow everything'. Should Facebook be sending embeds to 'legalize child porn' groups to help them focus their ads? What if they call themselves 'remove the restrictive and undemocratic age of consent laws' groups?

Embeds to 'make the US a purely Christian nation' groups, if they call themselves 'allow "traditional" values in the court room' groups?

You can't just wave your hands and say second order effects don't happen. There's not a slippery slope, just one long slog of difficult moral decisions, and we'll get some wrong and some right according to our inheritors, but you still have to engage and try to find the actual balance.

I fall on the side of allowing all speech that is not expressly illegal. It relies on the reader taking the time to educate themselves but it also allows for greater freedom of expression.

Yes, I'm well aware that deplorable people would be given a platform. I'm okay with that. I don't agree with them, but I can't justify not allowing them a platform to express themselves. No, Facebook is not legally obligated to provide that platform.

If it isn't expressly illegal in the host country, allow it.

Speech we approve of needs no defense. It was once offensive to suggest women should be allowed to vote. To think we are the apex of morality is hubris. So, I default to allowing everything that is not expressly illegal - as a moral view. I don't actually control the choices at the media giants or anything.

> Should Facebook be sending embeds to 'legalize child porn' groups to help them focus their ads?

Why not? I know it sounds horrible, but unless the ads explicitly serve child porn, a platform for legalizing child porn is merely a political position and covered under the first amendment.

You can go to a city hall, and start making your case for legalizing child porn and they can't do anything to prevent you from doing that (legally).

I know you're using this example as a rhetoric, but in US simulated child porn (like anime) is already legal and protected under the first amendment.

> Embeds to 'make the US a purely Christian nation' groups, if they call themselves 'allow "traditional" values in the court room' groups?

Either you don't live in America (or recently moved here) or you live in a deep bubble. I have seen ads about making America a Christian nation, similarly ads about putting traditional values in the courtrooms (check out the whole ten commandments in courtroom controversy).

It confuses the idea of child porn with literal child porn, similar to hate speech/depictions of violence with literal violence, neo-Nazis with literal 1940 Nazis, historical statues with racists. Free speech makes on sense in this regressive mindset.

A simpler way to say your accusation is that 'it confuses the sign with the signified', and I didn't.

I feel like this thread got a little lost.

There's a difference between something being legal and being societally encouraged. The original article is about companies working actively to help groups. I think 'age of consent' people should be allowed to shout it from the street corner of their choice, but I don't believe we as a society have to then applaud or patronize people who make a business out of selling them bullhorns.

"Some people say" Google refusing to run your ads or host your site (which I guess we've now slipped to from 'sending employees to help grow your business') is censorship, but that's only the case if you're a protected class.

And nope, born and raised in the good old midwest, and in fact had write essays on the ten commandments controversy in grade school.

> As recent as what...50 or so years ago, racism was a 'normal political view' so to speak, in USA at least

It still is. Never went away.

That is a pretty daring statement considering Germany just passed far-reaching anti-hate speech legislation with no precise definition of what hate-speech is, leaving it to social networks to interpret.

The law does not refer to vague "hate speech" (or a translation thereof) or extends any definition of illegal content. Instead it lists specific types of content for which there is decades of legal precedents. It extends the liability of platforms (which makes them more eager to delete borderline cases) but does not change anything about the legality of content itself.

(FWIW, I see many problems with that law and it should never have passed but there is so much misinformation being spread that it gets tiring to correct.)

No, now you are blatantly spreading misinformation yourself. The law has extended and modified the penal code.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz

Just check 'verabschiedetes gesetz'.

You misread the Wikipedia article. That section compares a draft with the final law. Between those two versions the list of laws that social networks need to watch out for has been changed. The law has not modified the Criminal Code, nor was it ever planned. Please read carefully before accusing others of spreading misinformation or you will do it yourself.

Here are the full four pages of the law as passed: https://www.bmjv.de/SharedDocs/Gesetzgebungsverfahren/Dokume... and this is an English translation: https://www.bmjv.de/SharedDocs/Gesetzgebungsverfahren/Dokume...

But wouldn’t people still have those ideas? My worry is that preventing their discussion you never know how many people think a certain way until it is too late.

I think it's disingenuous to claim that's all that's being removed from Facebook in Germany, even today. My wife is German and she's seen pages/profiles get banned that are just generally anti-immigration.

I’d love to see proof of that

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