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Comment by PurpleBoxDragon | Hacker News Reader

What about "I've heard Joe is a a deviant criminal"? The rumor does not have to be true for the statement (that the rumor was heard) to be true.

What about "Joe has, at the time this sign was made, never denied beating his wife on Decemeber 31st." The claim could be very true in that Joe never has denied that specific claim because there was no reason to deny a claim that hadn't been made yet.

What about putting up the sordid details of a teenagers love life on a bulletin board outside her high school? Assume you verified the statements as factual. Is there perhaps an issue even when it is the truth?

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Harassment is a crime. Countering it does not require censorship. (Except in the sense of restraining orders, which are actually targeted at the responsible party)

You are now largely placing the effort to fix the problem on the victims.

Sometimes the platform really is the problem. It’s the old mean rime before dick issue, if you let people share content you will see verious kinds of content. Nintendo for example gets around this by limiting what messages you can send to other people.

I am not saying it’s nessisarily appropriate for collages, but it is a real issue schools need to deal with.

>Sometimes the platform really is the problem.

The platform you're talking about is the internet. So do we outlaw billboards? What about TV? I could always run a commercial, right? Are newspapers ok?

We have laws that are reactive because we are not a country feels comfortable providing safety by stripping freedoms. You can come up with blatant examples all day, but real world scenarios will not always be so cut and dry. I lean to the side of less restriction, not more.

Billboards, TV etc have a lot of laws associated with them which cause the owners to act preemptively. So, it's generally not possible to anonymously post an explicit x rated image on a Billboard or TV commercial due to the people doing manual content reviews. Prime time TV added tape delays and a manual bleep to avoid similar issues.

That's not to say message boards need to have some person review every post before it goes public. But, that is a possible theoretical solution to this issue. Granted it's not economically viable, but plenty of other businesses models are also limited by the law.

PS: HN is actually a great example of what's possible while still allowing random postings online while avoiding many of these issues.

>Billboards, TV etc have a lot of laws associated with them which cause the owners to act preemptively. So, it's generally not possible to anonymously post an explicit x rated image on a Billboard or TV commercial due to the people doing manual content reviews. Prime time TV added tape delays and a manual bleep to avoid similar issues.

Sure, we've decided as a society to limit some freedoms for the greater good. You also cannot shout "fire" in a movie theater. We have libel and slander laws. We have laws against harassment.

It's a question of where to draw the line, and I believe censoring legal discourse crosses it.

I don't see a lot of people trying to repeal the "The seven dirty words" you can't say on TV or radio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words

This case is also rather far from the mark of polite discourse and would have been blocked from billboards etc. It's more about how to do this kind of management and some back and forth as we figure out societal norms for new things just seems reasonable to me.

"Figure something out or we block you." -> "How about this?" or "Meh you're not worth dealing with."

>Harassment is a crime.

Which goes back to the other poster's question of where is the problem if it is a factual claim. Assuming they share in the same answer as you, it seems the problem occurs at the point where stating factual statements crosses over into harassment.

While a generic answer that I generally find agreeable, the devil is always in the details, no? Where exactly is that line, and is there still not a problem if someone behaves in manner that is extremely close to but not crossing that line?

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