Comment by martin1975 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by martin1975 | Hacker News Reader

The only thing that can and ought to be realistically removed is illegal speech and SCOTUS has already defined what that is... Any other attempts, while well intentioned, will probably backfire. FB seems to take one step forward and two steps back each time they try to take some moral high ground when it comes to free speech... I like the fact they recently increased transparency behind who is paying for ads - whether they are advertising fake or true info, the reader gets to decide what's veritable vs what isn't ultimately, as it should be. Now, they will "identify misinformation".. in other words, they will appoint themselves as adjudicators of what is truth (e.g. "mis-information") vs what is not... they are a medium for free speech - not a scientific, peer-review type of website where consensus kills off or approves publishing of content.

This continuous grasping at straws by FB, Twitter, google, whomever really - of determining what is acceptable in the realm of opinion/1st Amendment speech is really exhausting and will mean the death of their platforms.

While I agree with your sentiment. The 1st amendment starts with "Congress shall make no law". Facebook is free to police whatever content they don't like without any repercussions in law. It is up to society "us" to police a company like facebook that is doing things we don't agree with.

exactly and I do not disagree. There is wisdom however in allowing the maximum latitude to everyone in their expression. It is my belief that the 1st amendment through its numerous evolutions, refinements and interpretations in the 200+ year history of American jurisprudence allows for more freedom of expression than what Mark Zuckerberg and his investors or Jack Dorsey and his investors can come up with....

I am certain they all disagree with me ;).

edit: the hardest thing when faced with offensive (personally to me, or someone else) content is to ignore it and let it die without a response in the case where it is legal. What was that saying? Do not feed the troll....?

Right, it us up to us to enjoy the content we want. The internet provides everything from porn to gambling to politics to hacker news and that is a beautiful thing.

> The only thing that can and ought to be realistically removed is illegal speech

No, Facebook obviously realistically can remove anything it wants. The idea that a private (and international) information distribution segment only ought to remove content that is specifically illegal under US law, and has no right or legitimate interest in removing any other content from it's platform, is somewhat bizarre.

There are always loud fringe groups who, unable to persuade the majority to their line of thinking, instead focus their efforts on coercing leaders of institutions to force their line of thinking onto the majority. Tattle-tales in school turn into busy-bodies on HOA boards and professional protestors outside of Twitter HQ. There is no "victory" for these people, only goal posts that can be pushed ever further until they are 6ft under.

There are always cases where it is hard to understand what is true and what is not. But then there are also explicit lies.

It's not hard to adjudicate that Trumps ambassador to the Netherlands is lying when he talks about politicians being burned to death in the Netherlands due to immigration. But having the claim repeated over and over still creates the impression that there is some truth to it.

And that in turn hurts immigrants and makes it harder for people to come to rational decisions.

Your reasoning basically presumes that all humans are infinitely rational and have infinite time to investigate facts (the reader gets to decide). Neither of these assumptions is true, or a useful approximation. Otherwise user interface design for programs would look extremely different.

As people have all sorts of cognitive fallacies built in, and have extremely limited time to investigate facts, we need to build (and maintain) a society that makes it easy to come to rational, reasonable decisions. The Internet has disrupted the social structures that performed this function in the past, and new ones are only slowly emerging.

well put. I am for both options existing on the internet - for people who want an AOL/Compuserve/tailored kind of internet as well as for people who like to live on the UNIX command line and peruse gopher for news :).

The 1st Amendment, which I admit I treat as the 'gospel' of free speech in these cases, allows for both. It just seems private enterprise in certain geographic areas of the world tends to skew more toward one view of the internet while leaving out the other in the cold... I'm trying to put this is mildly as I can :).

Right, so keeping the ability to host and make your own website around is vital. And there are many regions in the world where you can go to jail for your blog.

For the scope of the 1st amendment, I sometimes feel there is some nuance missing when this is invoked, as if this was the only thing written in the constitution. The SCOTUS recognizes that the right to free speech competes with other rights, and thus there are limits. You can't lie in advertisement. You can't provoke someone with "fighting words", you can't say things that are the IP of others, NDAs are honored, you can get fired for what you say on facebook outside working hours, really the list is endless.

In fact, as I just discovered, and as is very pertinent to this discussion:

In Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. (1974), the Supreme Court decided that there is "no constitutional value in false statements of fact".

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

That Americans keep thinking private companies have to abide SCOTUS rulings astonishes me

SCOTUS rulings shape lower courts abilities

Like here for example, HN can remove dick picks no problem

People are free to avoid those platforms if they don’t like the rules

Correct. But how has not going by the wisdom of SCOTUS' rulings by private entities played out? Even Y Combinator agreed it hasn't gone well, or they wouldn't have bootstrapped GAB.ai at some point in the past.

Once you start looking at those effects... makes you wonder, right? Speaking of dick pics, I don't think you can post one on HN. You could do a link to one, but it'll get greyed out/downvoted..not removed, unless I'm mistaken.

Nobody said that these platforms are forced to follow the supreme Court.

We instead are saying that it would be a bad idea for them not to do so.

Facebook is free to make whatever mistakes it wants. That doesn't change the fact that it is a mistake.

You're absolutely correct. I am merely saying, for maximum coverage/attention spans, it would be prudent to go by the SCOTUS rulings, even for private entities. While that may initially turn -some- people away because of their... views, shall we say, eventually I think it will pay off in the long run and attract even more visitors than had they remained constrained by abridging the 1st Amendment on their platforms.

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