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Comment by djoldman | Hacker News Reader

I've always been curious about "content moderation." Theoretically, if you could perfectly allow only content that was Legal in the jurisdiction, wouldn't every website allow everything Legal and be able to just point at the laws and say, "if you don't like it, change the law"?

If so, is the crux of the problem that 1. we don't know what is legal, 2. We can't perfectly allow it, and or 3. Something else.

If 3, is it that websites don't really fear legal repercussions, but fear bad PR, thus alienating users/revenue? If so, doesn't it follow that the level of content moderation will track the projected cost of losing the projected users/revenue?

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The crux of the problem is that limiting moderation only to allowing content which is illegal and banning what is illegal still allows content many people may find objectionable, spam, trolling, racist and hateful speech and off topic content.

Not every online community wants to be a 4chan or Voat, which is what that sort of hands off moderation inevitably leads to.

4chan is one of the most popular websites out there, clearly that is a sign that people do want that freedom. What for me is even more shocking is that young people browse the boards in public and it's a mainstream discussion.

Some people obviously do and they're welcome to it, just not everyone, everywhere. No one comes to Hacker News for puerile humor and racist edgelord shitposting, and when it shows up here it gets banned.

What if you just give each person a way to censor the content they don't want to see?

Something like show dead posts on hn.

Although, why host content that isn't profitable?

> What if you just gave each person a way to censor the content they don't want to see?

That works to a degree, but it isn't foolproof because it still requires people to see that content to begin with. It isn't proactive.

> What if you just gave each person a way to censor the content they don't want to see?

> Something like show dead posts on hn.

Or a killfile in a news client. While usenet was to some extent full of troll posts and spam, with the right filters, the signal to noise ratio was very high.

...just give each person a way...

That option works poorly against targeted harassment or brigading.

That only really works if it can hide harrassment from you automatically

> I've always been curious about "content moderation." Theoretically, if you could perfectly allow only content that was Legal in the jurisdiction, wouldn't every website allow everything Legal and be able to just point at the laws and say, "if you don't like it, change the law"?

No. Many websites would want to be environments with different standards than the minimal legal one. In the same way that you see different types of discussion and language in church than in school than at work than at home. Of course, none of those places have to try to do it at scale... but should anyone try to do it at scale?

Do we need that scale?

> wouldn't every website allow everything Legal and be able to just point at the laws and say, "if you don't like it, change the law"?

Again and again, industries operated by rational agents self-regulate with the goal of preventing the government from getting involved. (With many obvious exceptions, like businesses seeking regulatory capture, producers of commodities with razor thin margins, operators who don't expect to be in business long enough for regulation to take effect, etc.)

Once you get the government involved, you have not only the risk of public backlash whenever you make a mistake, you have the risk of fines or worse. Now your legal council has to get involved in the operation of your moderation system. You potentially need multiple people to sign off on moderation decisions to ensure compliance as well as a system to maintain a paper trail in case government auditors come sniffing around. Your operational costs begin to balloon.

A PR person who says, "If you don't like our behavior, change the law" is basically self-destructive.

I'm not sure the idea of "if it's legal somewhere it must be legal everywhere" is going to fly. There are areas of the world where it's not illegal to have sex with minors for example.

So maybe you try to say "if it's legal to a majority of our users then it is legal on the site", but then it becomes illegal to discuss Tienanmen Square on your supposedly global website.

Websites that ignore the law get shut down or shut out. Declaring yourself above the law because you're on the web never works once law enforcement is involved.

Legality is only one of numerous considerations. It's highly consequential, but also variable, often hugely, in both space and time.

Most pointedly where one jurisdiction's mandated content is another's prohibited. Maps exhibit this frequently, though there are other examples.

I've addressed considerations other than law already in this thread.

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