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Comment by rmtech | Hacker News Reader

> in all the hotly debated discussions I had, I found anything of value in the person being censored

I think history is a better guide because we can more clearly see what was valuable. Things that were censored in the past:

* Heliocentricism

* Evolution, esp of humans from other apes

* Capitalism/market economics (in socialist states)

* Currently mainstream views about biology (e.g. Lysenkoism)

Free speech is a "hits" business: most of the value comes from a few incredibly valuable ideas that someone powerful is trying to censor. The damage done to Russia and China under communism easily exceeds all the extra "smoothness" that they got out of censoring those who disagreed with them.

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None of these examples are hate speech.

There is a formal legal definition of hate speech in the countries where these laws apply and it would be nice if people arguing against those laws would accept that, instead of continuously conflating things that are not hate speech.

Yes, which of these views would have been shut down by a policy forbidding hate speech?

I am now mostly worried about state censorship, which do remove things like the items you list.

Censoring hate speech and people who promote exclusion of minorities? I have not a single example of it being detrimental to a healthy debate.

I'm pretty sure that all of those views were censored because they were immoral according to the dominant ideology of the day, and in every case it would have been argued that this time the censorship was good because the dominant ideology was good, whereas previous instances of censorship were bad.

How would someone in the USSR know that censorship of opponents of Lysenkoism was bad? As far as they were concerned, the people being censored were evil counter-revolutionaries of whom nothing good could come.

Wouldn't "only censor/condemn hate that's tied to a protected class" be a decent test? Where protected class is defined as the stuff people cannot change about themselves. This test seems quite timeless and orthogonal to the problematic "immoral."

White male is decidedly a protected class with that definition.

Disclaimer: I am Asian and like to point out irony, don't lynch me.

No lynching here; another comment of mine points out irony as well. That said, white male isn't some sort of exception just because some do/did abhorrent things -- the white males who don't (and they certainly can't control whether they descend from those who did) do abhorrent things don't deserve it. Feel free to define a set of people who suck based on their actions, but white male can't be an analogue for that definition.

Yes and? Hate speech against white male would be brought down as well.

Let's dive into that: here are tweets made by the accusers leading to Linux Foundation's judgment. https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/dtnamp/linux_foundat...

Well, have clear rules, clear penalties and due process, saying crap about any skin color is hate speech. You have no shortage of that in the US right now.

That's not my country and not much of my business but if half of your country is fine using its free speech defending KKK apologists and the other half only meets that with apathy, don't be surprised if some Black Panthers come back to life and use their own free speech fighting back.

And maybe I am less shocked by this affair because in many European cities, wearing a MAGA hat would be seen pretty close as wearing nazi insignia. Under it, lies either someone very racist or someone very confused. And either way probably someone that is not going to have a constructive participation.

So yeah, probably lack of clear rules, lack of due process, I hope that's the takeaway they'll get from it.

Arbitrary enforcement of vague rules is authoritarianism, but you can have clear rules and due process to limit hate speech. It has been done successfully in several places.

What you think MAGA stands for is not what it actually stands for. You're stating all kinds of extremist positions that 99% of people in the US do not hold.

Anyone can stir up outrage against a made up situation.

> in many European cities, wearing a MAGA hat would be seen pretty close as wearing nazi insignia

Which ones?

I agree with having clear standards. I think the proportions in the US are not quite as dire as you portray.

That's true, he is "just" at 40% of support among voters.

He still has won an election in a country that pretends to be democratic, so I'll politely assume he was the choice of the majority.

That's a far cry from 'defending KKK apologists'. Then again, having seen other responses you've made in this post, I'm skeptical I should be trying to persuade you.

I think you're misunderstanding the reasons for free speech.

As soon as some entity gets a license to start banning speech, you have given bad ideas an advantage over good ones.

This is because a bad memeplex can co-opt the censorship apparatus and kill off any competitors without having to face them in a fair fight.

The criterion you mentioned about hate speech etc is extremely flexible and dependent on a bunch of definitions and interpretations that the censors will be in control of - exactly the kind of thing that the free speech principle protects us from!

> and in every case it would have been argued that this time the censorship was good because the dominant ideology was good, whereas previous instances of censorship were bad.

The idea of general progress is a fairly recent one. At the times of Galileo trials, many people would have proclaimed with pride that they were following the pure and unalterable criterion of the glorious classics of antiquities.

Notwithstanding that, our modern understanding of the evils of censorship is not just based on a shift in morality, it is based on a reasoning on the nature of debate, science, uncovering of truth and the importance of controversy.

There are places where, if you have a good argument, one can argue about the differences between genders, ethnicities, religions (<- God knows I waste so much time on that subject) or sexual orientation. One is allowed to propose an argumented view at odd with the majority.

Once that is preserved, I do not see what discussion of value is suppressed by suppressing hate speech.

Using Galileo as an example isn't very useful since even though it turns out that he was right, at the time he didn't actually have real proof so the church was right to tell him not to publish his opinion since he didn't have adequate evidence for his position. The problem the church had with him wasn't that they thought that the sun had to orbit the Earth, but that he wouldn't stop trying to make people use his method without actual proof.

But who decides which opinions are possible to exclude without being detrimental?

Turtles, all the way down!

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