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Comment by peterwwillis | Hacker News Reader

These "norms" are generalized and not always applicable to real life. If I disapprove of you yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater, should I also have to defend your right to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater? We "erode freedom of speech" when it hurts people.

This is not about "weird people with quirky ideas". This is about people who use speech to abuse, cause harm, intimidate, harass, or inspire others to commit such abuses. This cannot be tolerated in a society that wants the right to "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

One can always find a non-abusive way to present an idea. But when they cross the line into a form of abuse or violence, they should be stopped.

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I hate generic statements like, "if you use speech to try to hurt people". They tend to be made to let you say something and get many people agreeing with you who would not otherwise if they knew what you really were after. So I would ask you to define what constitutes "hurt" and define what constitutes "people" in your sentence.

I don't think you mean all people... because in the same sentence you advocate harm (or the de facto threat thereof) to some people based on what they might say. So is this hurt feelings? Actual physical harm (or the fear thereof)?

Or are you suggesting that people should be free only to say those things within some pre-approved range of ideas of which people like-minded to yourself are prepared to tolerate?

To be specific, if you're saying that any person that would advocate physical harm, or cause a reasonable person to be fearful of physical harm, should be prevented from speaking... then I'm likely with you. If you really mean more than that, then "hell no!" back at ya.

Please note that the original post to which I replied appears to have been edited some time after my reply; so if my comment appears to not have context, note that the context changed.

Nonsense! Yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater has a very high risk of getting hundreds of people instantly killed. It is not at all equivalent to verbally abusing someone. More so, verbal abuse is frequently socially desirable and useful! 2pac verbally abused people, many think of him as a great artist and social commentator. Many, many, many, many, many great artists did too -- Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevskiy, among countless others.

I've been reading your comments with a lot of interest, but I feel like you took the easy road out on this reply. I think it's clear the OP isn't talking about single instances where someone verbally abuses another person. I agree it's useful/fine to criticize political leaders or for a rapper to diss another rapper. What we're actually dealing with in practice are people instigating hate for other groups of people, in some cases often the same fascist rhetoric used to incite violence (and the acceptance thereof) in Nazi Germany (yes, Godwin's law, yada yada), where do you draw the line?

Do we philosophically want to live in a world where people can be incited to great amounts of violence just because we want to protect FoS on private platforms?

> Do we philosophically want to live in a world where people can be incited to great amounts of violence just because we want to protect FoS on private platforms?

Do we want to live in a world, where everyone will be scared to say anything socially unacceptable (because it _might_ lead to violence!) because of the total deplatforming that might happen as a conseqence?

There is a lot of blurring around the definition of "inciting violence", and I am scared of the slippery slope too.

Verbally abusive music actually gets people killed in Chicago [re: drill music]. Teenagers even get killed over Twitter comments. It's not a joke.

Sorry: NO. If someone is murdered the murderer is responsible, not the person who wrote abusive lyrics or twitter comments.

On the other hand, if you shout "fire" in a crowded place, you make yourself responsible of causing a dangerous situation. Same as flying a drone over an airport or throwing stones from a building.

Actually, In Chicago, with drill music, the murderer and the person who wrote the lyrics are sometimes one in the same. But even when they aren't personally murdering someone, often their 'hitter' is. And the music's gang-specific nature actually encourages 'beefs' over territory which quickly become violent. The music is literally crafting violence, by being the dog-whistle of gang politics.

You can see parallels with white extremists that write racist screeds, and later go on to commit violence themselves, or when their writing inspires violence. One former white supremacist who was the leader of a popular white supremacist punk band admitted he knew there were people who committed violence and quoted his music as an inspiration, which in part helped him leave his old views behind.

To paraphrase Bob Dylan, music can't keep a revolution going. But it can and does encourage people to act.

I think you missed the point of importance of clear link between violence-inciting-speech and actual violence. Because a lot of stuff today gets labeled as "hate speech" without direct violent consenquences - and that is the problem. Because once you relax the standards for the link between violence and speech, you can ban as "hate speech" _anything_.

And I am not meaning just "controversial" social/political views - for example FPS games were often tarred as "violence inciting" with little to no evidence just 15years ago. In current framework, that would be enough to actually ban them. Do you really think it's a good idea to go down this rabbit hole of banning anything that "might" lead to violence one day?

Does it mean we should ignore dogwhistling? Honestly, I don't know. It's a really hard problem I think. And current "solutions" of deplatforming "extremists" don't seem to be working towards reducing actual violence / social tension, so I don't think it's the right approach.

Except that in modern culture people tend to call anything they disagree with "abuse", like using a wrong pronoun or not supporting feminism enough.

I want to live in a world where anyone is free to say any stupid idea they want, and anyone else is free to correct them or ignore them or do whatever they like.

Actual harm/abuse/harassment should be illegal of course, like the kind where a person is physically doing stuff to another person against their will.

But if blocking a person on twitter is all it takes to avoid "harassment", maybe that's the best way to deal with that.

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