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Comment by factorialboy | Hacker News Reader

Are conspiracy theories a crime? Should they be censured? This seems short-sighted. How much power should corporate social media giants assume?

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One might argue, in the US anyway, that free speech has explicit limits when harming the public: yelling "fire" in a theater is the classic example.

Pushing an agenda of literal chaos and death through theories like "it's only the flu" or "mask = oppression" is getting actual people killed, right now, by the thousands. Of course the devil is always in the details and the fuzzy lines.

Yelling "fire" in a theater is a classic misexample.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

Good article. It seems the 1969 test disallowed speech that "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".

Encouraging people to violate mask orders would fit this definition.

Perhaps, if the speaker incited a crowd to remove their masks at a protest in a municipality in which not wearing a mask was illegal.

Simply advocating that people violate mask orders doesn't pass the imminence test.

How would this statement apply to organizing mass protests during a pandemic? Would you be for or against censoring that type of speech?

> Should they be censured?

Well, look at what happened with Alex Jones and his Sandy Hook theories.

If they cause measurable harm to others, then yes media companies have a responsibility censure people on their platforms who spread conspiracy theories.

But who is keeping score? You can't censure Alex Jones and QAnon, then give the MSM outlets that pushed the Steele dossier a free pass. They caused measurable harm to an entire nation. Most of QAnon is innocuous, even if conspiratorial. I'd argue Q is far less dangerous than a national media outlet that knowingly pushes dangerous narratives.

A private, for-profit social media service can decide which customers they want business from and which customers they don't want business from. It's one of the main rights you have as the operator of a business: the right to refuse service.

The conspiracy theorist's right to free speech doesn't mean Twitter is obligated to carry their speech, either.

If you dislike this your best available remedies are 1) find a service who wants your business, or if none such exists, 2) start your own social media service, or to "solve" the problem for good, 3) engineer the existence of government-operated social media services such that law mandates all citizens have unfettered free speech on the service

Stop government officials from making policies on twitter and we will consider twitter private company. Still, no one thinks there should be additional regulation on something like twitter? The past account hack just made me think it should be scrutinized more.

Twitter has the freedom to allow public officials to use the service for either personal or professional purposes. Many government agencies in many countries use Twitter to communicate with citizens via the service, similar to how they use Facebook or e-mail.

As far as President Trump goes, Twitter has had to make policy exceptions in order to ensure his continued access to the service, AND legal proceedings have also resulted in rulings that govern his specific use of the service (for example, he's technically not allowed to block citizens.) As such it's not especially useful to look at Trump's experience on Twitter and try to generalize it to anyone else.

I am not saying they shouldn't ban accounts or allow free speechers. But I don't buy they should be allowed to do whatever they want because they are private company. If the past hack resulted in market manipulation or a bigger shit show, should twitter be liable for that?

#3 sounds a bit scary but I think #2 is what the founders of Parler [1] are trying to do.

1. https://parler.com/

> Over several weeks, Twitter has removed 7,000 accounts that posted QAnon material, a company spokeswoman said. The accounts had been increasingly active, and had been involved in coordinated harassment campaigns on Twitter or tried to evade a previous suspension by setting up new accounts after an old account was deleted.

Maybe it's not just freedom lovers making use of their God-given right to free expression, or whatever.

They are going further than this on also removing many accounts from search, but given the many bad apples, I am unsurprised they're hiding the bunch.

QAnon isn't organic. It's a state actor working through stochastic methods.

This is an interesting thought. Could you expand on it?

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