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And yet,here you are, freely spouting non-sense, misinterpreting the second law of "thermal dynamics" and arguing for a very strict and highly-self-convenient notion of freedom of speech.

I still wish you can express your views all over the internet without the risk of being cancelled.

>I still wish you can express your views all over the internet without the risk of being cancelled.

I don't, especially if me spreading nonsense directly causes harm to a large number of people and the society. I do not believe my unlimited free speech rights is of higher priority the health and wellbeing of the overall society.

The whole "individual rights always triumphs over the interest of the society" is exactly the type of American exceptionalism I mentioned. It's a very strange notion in many cultures (and no doubt you'd say those cultures are inferior) and it's more or less another symptom of a culture that worships narcissistic behavior.

You are just one guy in the Internet, relax, dont give yourself too much importance. While people fight to stop the "tin-foil brigade" to have their loony youtube channels, they enshrine Hollywood actors, Silicon Valley neo-barons and politicians, whose opinions are ACTUALLY dangerous and influential, and yet none of them will be cancelled.isnt it curious?

The whole point of my comment is I am not important, and neither are you, so both of us should shut up if our speech materially hurt the society.

> Silicon Valley neo-barons and politicians, whose opinions are ACTUALLY dangerous and influential, and yet none of them will be cancelled.isnt it curious?

I see you failed on reading comprehension. They should be cancelled if they are proven to be dangerous to the society, such as anti-mask movement or anti-vaccine movement. I don't know why you are trying to trivialize "tin-foil brigade" when it literally killed many people this year.

> I am not important, and neither are you, so both of us should shut up if our speech materially hurt the society.

That's an oxymoron, if we are irrelevant we then dont have the power nor the audience to affect society in a grand scale.

> I see you failed on reading comprehension.

Nice try.

> They should be cancelled if they are proven to be dangerous to the society, such as anti-mask movement or anti-vaccine movement

And yet they are free as a bird. From Jim Carrey to Boris Johnson, from Jack Dorsey to Elon Musk, from Mark Zuckerberg to Alysa Milano, they have spouted absolutely nonsense and they are as influential as ever.They should not be banned btw, but ridiculed.Alex Jones deserves the same treatment and not being hypocritically swept under the rug.

> I don't know why you are trying to trivialize "tin-foil brigade" when it literally killed many people this year.

This a global pandemic, a big portion of the deaths was sadly unavoidable no matter your location in the map or your political persuasion, it is juicy ammunition for political gains though. The other big part in the deaths comes from the clusterfuck of mismanagement of the crisis. The people responsible for that WILL NOT be cancelled. The influence of the loonies in their youtube channels represents at worst a minuscule fraction of the deaths.

> They should be cancelled if they are proven to be dangerous to the society

“Proven” by who? You?

No thanks.

Way to make up strawman's argument.

Do you agree that there are objective facts that should be accepted by the society for the well being of the society? Such as Earth is not flat, vaccine does not cause autism, and wearing a mask is helpful at preventing Covid spread?

If you do not believe such object facts exist, then we do not live in the same reality, if you do, then there must be some mechanism that raises certain statements into the status of "facts", and that's the same kind of mechanism we should apply.

> Way to make up strawman's argument.

Please explain what you think I’m strawmanning. If you demand that certain topics be banned from discussion, you must explain, as a matter of implementation, who gets to decide what is banned.

> Do you agree that there are objective facts that should be accepted by the society

What, concretely, do you mean by "should be accepted by the society"? To use an extreme but historically common example, does it mean that people should be executed for having different beliefs? You need to be more specific.

> If you do not believe such object facts exist

I do believe the Earth is round. I do believe it’s a fact. I don’t believe people should be banned (or worse) because they think otherwise.

In fact, flat Earth theories are interesting, because they challenge my assumptions and ultimately clarify my understanding of the subject.

This is why freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas is so important: It is the only mechanism by which we can correct our own epistemology and keep it in check, both at the individual and at the societal level!

> there must be some mechanism that raises certain statements into the status of "facts"

Sure. What does this have to do with censorship, though? The topic of discussion was policy, i.e. what is to be imposed on other people.

Wow you are not even discussing in good faith anymore.

Where did I say discussion of certain topics should be banned? Where did I say people should be killed for believing different things? It’s literally strawman after strawman from you.

> you must explain, as a matter of implementation, who gets to decide what is banned.

No I don’t. I pointed out a problem, but I am not suggesting solutions, and I sure as hell don’t owe you an implementation.

> Where did I say discussion of certain topics should be banned?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24797649

> Do you agree that there are objective facts that should be accepted by the society for the well being of the society?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24795296

> They should be cancelled if they are proven to be dangerous to the society

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24795078

> I do not believe my unlimited free speech rights is of higher priority the health and wellbeing of the overall society.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24793340

> The whole "absolute free speech is a sacrosanct human rights for everyone" is an ideal that simply would not scale with the 21st century civilization.

> But we can all agree that freedom isn't free, at one point in the future the cost would be so high that the whole civilization would be facing a "give me freedom or give me death" moment.

Feel free to clarify what you meant, which is precisely what I was asking about.

> Where did I say people should be killed for believing different things?

I explicitly said that was an example, not something you specifically said.

If Jim Jones had an amplification like Twitter, maybe it would be 909,000 people that drank the kool-aid and killed themselves rather than the 909 people that did.

Some ideas don't deserve to be amplified, and there is no guarantee that anyone and everyone gets to have their ideas amplified by everyone else. I see far too much right-wing kool-aid being guzzled today, and it seems like about 40% of America would rather die by suicide than live in a world where compromise happens with liberals, and for no good reason except misinformation, disinformation, and subterfuge.

So you'd really rather watch the world burn than accept that Twitter has no obligation to amplify anyone's lies?

> If Jim Jones had an amplification like Twitter, maybe it would be 909,000 people that drank the kool-aid and killed themselves rather than the 909 people that did.

The mere fact you say that it shows you have 0 idea how a sect like that works and how it preys and works on people.

> I see far too much right-wing kool-aid being guzzled today

You are correct but it is highly suggestive you only mention right wing lunacies, sure, climate change denial, anti-vaccine movement and oil industry cheerleading are particularly popular in the right win and they will be very damaging to society. But how about left wing lunacy, no reason for concern? From opposition to nuclear energy to GMOs, blank slatism and denial of any significant difference due to sex or ethnicity, forced quotas across all areas of society, cancel culture, a strong government promoted censorship. I am going to be honest I am pretty left wing, for real, not the american variety, and with the exception of global warming and vaccines(this is not so clear cut politically) I find myself more often than not in the other side of the road from them,

I don't follow your argument. Free Speech doesn't mean that anyone has an obligation to listen.

You can solve being saturated by noise on the listening side much better than on the sending side... much better because the listeners needs are diverse, because listeners must be robust against adversarial inputs (or otherwise the first madman with a random number generator floods you out), because the listeners time/sanity is what is at stake so that's where the incentives are, and so on.

The fight against entropy should be all of our missions but it can be accomplished without forcefully silencing people.

"Free Speech doesn't mean that anyone has an obligation to listen"

Quite.

And those who have no obligation to listen include Facebook and Twitter. They are absolutely under no obligation to deliver any message you wish to send.

You won't get much disagreement from me on that basis though I wish that was the reasoning they gave-- rather than the transparently false statements about leaked documents.

I'm also dubious about applying that to private messages: Twitter isn't a party to those messages, interception of the content is an unlawful wiretap. Without unlawfully monitoring the content of the users private community it's not clear to me how they could be suppressing the content.

They are free to do whatever they want with any message on their platform, private or public. If they were regulated as a common carrier, this would not be the case.

I believe that Twitter and Facebook have no desire to be regulated as common carriers.

There is no way this is an unlawful wiretap, as they own and operate the wires.

This is absolutely not true under federal law (18 U.S. Code § 2511.) (also apparently CA PC 631).

It doesn't matter who owns the facilities. Except for certain narrow exceptions (warrants, government officers, jails, incidental operations necessary for maintenance) any unauthorized third party interception of a private communication is unlawful. Common carrier status is relevant for liability but is irrelevant for § 2511.

I think you are confusing a Twitter DM with a private communication. Note that Twitter is not intercepting your DMs, they are the ones transmitting and storing them.

I believe they should be treated as a common utility, because this is what they are because of network effects.

In that case, I think they would be under obligation to not silence people like this.

People are stupid. They're easily mislead. They make horrible decisions. Those decisions effect me.

> People are stupid.

But not people like you, of course.

> They're easily mislead.

That’s right. They need to be led by someone like you, instead.

> Those decisions effect me.

And your “stupid decisions” affect me. Which of us gets to subjugate the other, because the other is “stupid”?

See the problem, Colin? Where are you going to find these angels who will rule society for us? I’m not exactly eager to delegate the task to you.

Whoever owns the platform controls it. If you are sufficiently upset with that you can create your own platform.

And I’m free to criticize their censorship, and the way they lie about it.

If the only reply left is “Well, they can legally do it!” (assuming their lies about said censorship aren’t legally problematic), that’s very telling. It completely ignores the question of morality, especially when the platforms in question have so much control over society.

Lots of things are legal. That doesn’t make them right. In some cases, they’re very wrong.

This sounds nice in abstract. Let's walk it two steps towards the concrete:

1) Our elected officials suppressing the voices they believe are most dangerous to our society.

2) Donald Trump shutting down The New York Times.

This seems like a move that would jumpstart the entropy snowball, not slow it down.

As far as entropy goes, if we actually have a "supreme leader" then it would actually drastically lower entropy. It would be a shitty society to live in unless we are talking about a benevolent AI or something, but entropy would indeed be low.

Btw my original comment wasn't about the danger of free speech, it's about the danger of absolutely unchecked free speech from all aspects of society.

It should be the hill that civilization dies on, because without free speech there is no civilization. Without free speech corruption will grow and societies will decay because there is nothing to stop the rot before it spreads.

As long as there is people and society there will be a civilization one way or the other.

You may not like that civilization, but saying a specie cannot survive unless we adhere to democracy and free speech is the product of your upbringing but not the product of objective reality.

You could even make the argument that China and Russia are actively feeding into things like this in order to make people anti-free speech/thought and cause internal strife/erosion because our eroding institutions (including free speech) gives them a leg up globally to set their own agendas in motion.

The very fact that is successful just further reinforces my point doesn't it? If we see different countries as competing organisms, obviously in the 21st century China would have a leg over us precisely because of things like their government would shut down any anti-mask speech or movement at the first sight.

Imagine a terrorist cell just unleashed a biological weapon that's far more deadly than Covid. Which country do you think will fare better in this scenario, China or the U.S.? Would Americans still be arguing about the superiority of democracy and free speech if a majority of the people died?

You could make this argument about any totalitarian regime vs a free society, so no.

Of course I could make this argument, and it would be a very valid argument too.

There are pros and cons to each system, do you really believe free societies has absolutely zero trade offs or drawbacks?

No I don't believe there are no trade offs, I believe a free society is a vastly superior system despite its drawbacks. I'm sure if the United States government did a strict lockdown and welded the doors shut of COVID patients and left them to die, we'd have a much lower case count.

> I'm sure if the United States government did a strict lockdown and welded the doors shut of COVID patients and left them to die

No country did that, why are you making things up? China stopped people from leaving their houses but at the same time provide supplies and delivered food through organized effort for weeks. That was well documented by even foreigners living there.

Hell, let's not use China's example, what about countries like Singapore, South Korea, New Zealand, etc all managed to be both democracies and selectively enforce rules at the same time?

There is video evidence of China welding and barricading apartment doors shut with people still inside.

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1703503427818

https://www.msn.com/en-ae/news/other/is-china-locking-up-ent...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/business/china-coronaviru...

>Hell, let's not use China's example, what about countries like Singapore, South Korea, New Zealand, etc all managed to be both democracies and selectively enforce rules at the same time?

Not sure what your point is here. If you're saying information is a virus to society and we need reasonable restrictions on it to save it...I don't agree and there isn't much if any recorded history to support that assertion. Information and expression doesn't kill, it's not a virus. It's not even a comparison.

>I don't agree and there isn't much if any recorded history to support that assertion. Information and expression doesn't kill

What the hell? Are you serious? Yes, anti-semitism never killed anyone, anti-vaccine misinformation never hurt anyone, and calling Covid a hoax didn't cause any unnecessary death either /s.

>it's not a virus

It's not, because it spreads far, far faster than even the most dangerous virus.

Yes you are correct, it is the damn commies. That's why people like Snowden and Assange received all sort of protection by the western democracies for their roles in unveiling bad stuff done by powerful people. Could you imagine Snowden in Russia or Assange in a left latin country? Yucks.

That's a great deflection, but it's not in the same sphere as the fear of the newly found fears of election interference that is driving people to become anti-free speech. That is directly coming from Russia and China.

Snowden and Assange are quite different, though I am also not opposed to whistle blowers, if it isn't reckless and endanger lives (such as giving up troop positions, etc.)

> it's not in the same sphere as the fear of the newly found fears of election interference that is driving people to become anti-free speech.

I grew up in a latin-american country, US interference in elections was a given, not a suspiction, a fact, million of dollars poured by the NED and the CIA, which proportionally meant a huge fraction of the electoral budget in the country and yet people still went to vote. Now I need to feel worried about the end of the civilization as we know it because the russians bought 500k or so of facebook ads and have bot farms? Go to reddit, specifically to r/politics and you will see there the blue wave doing the same, but there is not outcry. Hillary lost, because she was a lousy candidate and because of the EC system, luckily for Vladimir he also got what the wanted, but not because of the genius of his intelligence services.

I don't deny any of that, and I don't think Hillary lost because of Russia. I don't even think that was their goal at all. The entire goal is to establish distrust in American institutions among the populace, which includes the 1A. That was my entire point.

I understand your point , but surely you would agree that A) Any Russian disruption is dwarfed by the inside dynamics in the country. B) Many people in power use the Russian-scare to promote a narrative that may help them to maintain or obtain power. This is nothing new. McCarthy did the same.