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Comment by darpa_escapee | Hacker News Reader

> Google working on project Dragonfly, a service that-according to the article: 'would blacklist phrases like “human rights,” “student protest,” and “Nobel Prize.”'

> People are (rightly) bothered by this.

> Facebook and Twitter tell Alex Jones to pound sand.

> People argue "Private corporations don't have to give anyone a platform".

One of the two actions you listed results in the families of school shooting victims getting harassed by Alex Jones social media following less and the other enables the imprisonment, torture and execution of millions of people in China.

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An accurate assessment, though I'm not sure if what I'm to take away from this is if there's some sort of 'ranking' system behind who gets to get away with what when it comes to 1) disagreeable speech 2) who is allowed to respond to it and how 3) who gets to decide what speech is promulgated and what speech is hidden.

In the Google case, I find objections to suppressing information from the citizenry at the behest of government forces.

In the Alex Jones case, I also find objections to harassing...well anyone who isn't themselves trying to agitate and disturb (don't start no s--- there wont be no s--- kind of thinking).

So I posit this question: why is one weightier than the other in how we view and analyze them, again? Being as dispassionate as possible, I fall back to my prior statement: taken at face value it seems like the major differences here boil down to scale. Project Dragonfly casts a wide net over the question of accessing information, whereas the banishment of Jones is more localized and pointed.

> Being as dispassionate as possible

Perhaps this is the issue? I know many of us software engineers hate to hear this, but... not everything can be rationalized down to cold, hard algorithms.

Most reasonable people with a shred of empathy would gladly ban censorship in China but also ban Alex Jones. Why? Because empathy tells us what is right and what is wrong.

Empathy is required to make many decisions, and ridding yourself of it in an effort to become more dispassionate does not always make you more correct.

This isn't a cold hard algorithm, and my dispassionate stance here doesn't mean I'm lacking empathy-given the specific context I've brought up: there is no decision tree here being pondered.

It's also not an endeavor to be correct about the matter.

This is an attempt to objectively understand what appears to be an interesting dichotomy in popular responses to who we allow to be the gatekeepers of disseminated information and opinion, and what (un)enumerated power we tacitly give them.

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