Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

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I would prefer content not to be prohibited at all. Content is not a problem. Actions are a problem. Watch all the videos you like telling you to burn down a cell tower. Once you do burn down a cell tower, then you go to jail. Perhaps we should also then hold the people telling people to burn down cell towers responsible, criminally and civilly, for the people who listen to them.

David Icke might not be so cavalier about telling people to burn down cell towers if he could be sued and/or jailed after people took him up on it.

As a general principle, I think we should focus on actual consequences, not imagined, potential consequences.

This has the effect of also encouraging useful dissent. If you disagree with WHO and you turn out to be right, you can be properly credited with it. You are not automatically punished for the crime of daring to disagree with the WHO, and we all benefit from having more accurate, useful information.

If you’re worried about freedom of speech, then giving more people standing to sue David Icke for taking his dumb advice would be far more stifling than allowing YT to ban people. This would basically allow anyone with deep enough pockets to police speech using the courts.

> This would basically allow anyone with deep enough pockets to police speech using the courts.

Which, tbf, the US and UK already have to some degree.

Which is what I was thinking of.

But there is a big difference between the U.K. and America here; in the U.K. if you lose a litigation, you have to pay your opponents legal bills. In America the cases where the loser must pay are very limited with high bars to clear. This means that it’s absolutely possible to bankrupt someone in America with frivolous lawsuits, so long as those lawsuits aren’t bad enough to trigger the limited exceptions.

If you're going to give people advice, you should be prepared to take at least partial responsibility for what happens when they take that advice.

If a lawyer, doctor, accountant, engineer, or any professional gives you bad or malicious advice, they expose themselves to liability for the results of it. If you want to present yourself as an expert on some topic and expect people to listen to you, put some skin in the game and stand behind what you say. If you can't do that, you shouldn't be advising people on anything.

They could even keep the content available but give it a ranking penalty. This way they stop short of full on censorship, but also prevent the spread of terrible quality information.

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