Hacker News Reader

Comment by DyslexicAtheist | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if some of this could be solved with stricter checks on where an ad-campaign is purchased from and by limiting the reach to that country / region. Say, a company in Overtheristan buys a campaign to target French users it should be prohibited to do so unless it has a physical presence in France which can be sued.

Maybe it would limit the meddling/damage that can be done. Not that this is very elegant, but it seems better then the suggestion often aired in media and politics which discriminate against free speech ...

This sounds silly (probably because it is) but would be interested what the rest of you thinks. Personally I'd have no problem with totally regulating ad-tech in a way that prohibits targeting users in other countries/jurisdictions. Also facebook should be held responsible in that country so that when a genocide like with the Rohinga happens then the CEO of that entity can answer questions in The Hague

View on HN

I'm a huge proponent of nearly unlimited freedom of speech. What I think is a great solution is a platform that allows nearly unlimited free speech, but requires opt-in tags for all content. So if one wanted to talk about "highly controversial topic x" whether in a way that's neutral, flatteringly or not so flatteringly, the content needs to be tagged as "highly controversial topic x" content before it's made public or the user will get banned. The upshot here is that both users and advertisers could easily find and avoid content they want and don't want exposure to, and nobody has to be gagged and dragged down to the ministry of love.

Can't this be done using NLP, or even just pulling term frequency within content? I imagine FB (& whoever else has access to the data) has to be doing this on the backend somewhere for their own research.

We essentially need a Google (the framework which they use to algorithmically understand web content) for social networks with a front-end UI for topical mapping.

Also to add to your idea, I'd be very interested in a social network that can do that, but also requires real ID's and has some sort of public display of the topics that any user talks about and engages with often.

That way if I'm talking to someone I can gauge if they're really someone I want to be talking to about a particular topic. (can also be used to better map taste to reviews of products/services/companies/etc)

This assumes no bots.

Eh, I just think advertisers need to stop caring. In fact, the fact that advertisers care at all is due to adtech, which IMO has ruined the internet.

If YouTube's algorithm recommends a hateful propaganda video to me, I shouldn't be angry at Pepsi for the preroll ad, they obviously don't specifically endorse that content. But the acceptance of targeted ads implies that endorsement. I just wish we could entirely abolish targeted advertising, it would make the internet overall a better place. And it wouldn't even make the ads less relevant, considering that Amazon and Google apparently can't recommend products I'm interested in even with all the data they've collected.

I am becoming far less a fan of "nearly unlimited freedom of speech", based on observing the results of nearly unlimited freedom of speech out in the real world. I'm quite all right forcing certain ideas underground these days. The degeneration of debate about society to "All things are opinion, and all opinions are equal" is demonstrably dangerous, and the desensitization of the public that comes with it is also demonstrably dangerous.

At a certain point, the welfare of society outweighs the freedom of the individual. And you agree with me. Hence the phrase "nearly unlimited".

>the welfare of society outweighs the freedom of the individual

That's one of the supporting principles of all totalitarian regimes. The problem is who defines what's the "welfare of society" (Normally is "the Party" or "the Leader").

Individual freedom is an inalienable right, and should not be curtailed, unless you're physically hurting others or infringing on their own freedom.

Yeah, yeah.

How about if you're planning to hurt others? That's "conspiracy" in most "totalitarian regimes" (that is, societies with laws). Is it a crime to point a loaded gun at someone, or only to pull the trigger?

How about incitement? Also a crime for any government. If someone encourages a murder, are they at least partly responsible for the murder?

Your definitions of freedom and oppression here are trivial mental exercises that fail in real-world application. Who defines what's the "welfare of society"? Depends on the society. You're confusing who defines it with how it is enforced. Governments have a monopoly on violence in the ideal case. Who controls the government? If it's a representative democracy, then it's more or less the will of the people.

I've seen this bullshit argument before, rather a lot. I saw it made when I asked if it was okay for the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville to surround a synagogue, torches in hand (which they did). And people with similarly shallow, trivialized senses of freedom and society argued that such behavior was fine, as long as they stayed on the public sidewalk.

Is enabling fascism a form of fascism? That's a good question for the theorists. As a friend of mine put it, "If you have to ask what the definition of fascism is in order to argue that you're not a fascist, you're a fascist".

The world is not black and white. Your examples of overt racism or threatening harm to others are easy calls to make. The problems of censorship and truth arbitration arise as you move toward the grey areas - e.g. one man’s pro-Trump rally in the rural South is another man’s Critical Mass in San Francisco.

> How about if you're planning to hurt others?

The rule of thumb that I go by is "we should allow whatever it is that the United States Supreme Court allows".

The thorny edge cases that you are talking about have been explored in depth by the Supreme Court, and I think that they have made good decisions.

(IE, the good decisions that they have made is to almost always side in favor of free speech).

I promise you, moderators work on thornier edge cases, with less experience and much less time than Supreme Court judges.

Further The USA SC is an unrealistic expectation and pointless bar of value when talking about Facebook and international speech.

> with less experience and much less time than Supreme Court judges.

I am not talking about the time that it would take to decide a case. I am instead using the Supreme Court as a general example of where on the scale of freedom/ censorship that platforms should take.

The location on that scale should be "What would the supreme court do?" I think that they have chosen a good balance, is why.

>That's one of the supporting principles of all totalitarian regimes.

Actually that's one of the supporting principles of all regimes, period.

Conspiring to suppress even a meritless idea is one of the best ways to reinforce it. The backlash against "no platform" attacks on the marketplace of ideas should have been no surprise.

It's too easy to use shell corporations to hide the trail. And when talking of the case of manipulating public opinion, it's hard for the legal system to work fast enough to deal with it. Moreover, it's not just ads... it's sockpuppet accounts, and other things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com