Hacker News Reader

Speech in freedom of speech refers to the communication of ideas and opinions, not all communication. The term "freedom of expression" is commonly used to clarify this. Lying to your partner is not a crime. Taking their money under those circumstances is the crime.

But again, this is just the status quo. Why is lying to someone to take their money a crime, but lying to someone to influence an election not? What makes money worth special protections, but voting not?

the difference "lies" between lying to befriend and date a girl and sleep with her versus lying so to incarcerate and rape the same girl, the later is a crime when she has no full consent in the act

Lying to defraud someone is illegal because they don't have full consent, but lying to make someone misvote is not because...they do have full consent. I don't follow.

If you lie to me and I end up signing a contract that benefits you vs. if you lie to me and I end up signing a ballot that benefits you. Where's the difference?

I'm not going to touch this analogy, it's in bad taste and doesn't elucidate anything.

the definition of fraud follows the laws, not logic. laws aren't uniform and crime equipotent, because they model a trade-off between societal, communal and individual damage, plus a great deal of unfairness from certain topic being propped up by politicians or special interests groups

In this thread we're discussing why the law is the way it is (with the subtext that, perhaps, we should modify it). Saying that "the law is this way because that's the way the law is" is circular. Which is what I was getting at when I said "But again, this is just the status quo" a few posts upthread.

To make the question more explicit: why should the non-legal, but supposedly fundamental, right to "freedom of expression" protect your ability to lie to me about a political candidate, but not a contract?

The stealing is what makes it a crime, not the personal benefit. If you rob someone solely to the benefit of your favorite charity, you still robbed someone.

I would assume explicit actions like mislabeling ballots or actually changing someone's vote on them is a crime. Perhaps even tricking people about polling place locations or the party of candidates. But it's obviously very dangerous ground once you venture multiple degrees of freedom off into policing conspiracy theories or political ads, given the risks of abuse. It should be just as hard as to convict people for murder via such distant effects. Especially since in voting, people have access to alternative views, including yours.

This is typical of capitalist thought: property is sacrosanct, voting is worth nothing.

But it's still fraud even if you don't steal anything. Lying on a job application is fraud, even if you ultimately do the job perfectly well.

So why is lying on a job application for the purpose of getting a job illegal, unless that job is an elected position? (note that lying on behalf of someone else to help them get a job is also fraud, so the same question could be asked of someone lying on behalf of or in support of a candidate)

>Rape by deception is a situation in which the perpetrator obtains the victim's agreement to engage in sexual intercourse or other sex acts, but gains it by deception such as false statements or actions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_by_deception

As the wikipedia article illustrate, the scope is very narrow and depend on the country. A broad interpretation would have a significant impact.

A trivial example would be a divorce where one partner has been caught with a false statement or action. Any sexual intercourse at a date between the lie and the other person finding out would potentially be rape since consent might have changed if the person has been truthful. If both sides are cheating on each other then we would be in the weird state were both were raping each other at the same time, as both would be using deception in order to obtain the victims agreement before the act.

The wast majority of cases described in the Wikipedia article is when one party is asleep, which to me is not about deception at all but rather the state of the victim and their ability to consent. Further down the article, the California case is interesting but involve other crimes in connection to the act which muddles the definition. Last we have the Israel one with the religious aspect, and I strongly doubt a similar case would be allowed in places where such religious aspects would hold less weight. Being consistent under the Israel case, a gold digger would similar be raping it victim since they too would have lied about their interest in a long-term relationship.

I guess this is why it's called capitalism.

Jokes aside, I think that democracies which are split up into executives, legislatives and judicatives are not well designed from an architectural standpoint.

What's missing is a society of technologically specialized gremiums that evaluate knowledge and truthfulness, and are able to either control the press or to control the legislative process.

So many laws have been created out of misinformation, stupidity, and resulting fear... So that generations to come are harmed by this shit. It's absurd.

In Germany, we technically have the "Rat der Wissenschaften" but it basically has no purpose. It's just there for nothing, and has no power over any other instance.

The irony is that in Germany the only instance that was able to do anything against the misinformation cases was actually the Bundeskartellamt, which serves the purpose of finding out wrong flows of money and does financial audits in illegal syndicates.

Was this written by an AI

Nope, by a German speaker in good but imperfect English

It is because politicians lie. Filtering one side but no the other by the media and social media is censoring.

They are interfering with election.

Maybe politicians shouldn't be allowed to lie?

Then the people who decide what the politicians are allowed to say would themselves be politicians.

This is a perceptive comment, and is the reason we need free speech. If we only allow "good" speech, who decides what "good" is?

A dictatorship of politifact? No, tech firms are experimenting with that already. It results in things like tables of public data being classed as "disinformation".

The whole idea of fact checking is naive. Nobody is trustworthy enough to determine truth. Everyone who tries turns it into "truth is whatever powerful people say it is" (which is itself circular logic of course, but the people deciding on the meaning of truth are rarely all that bright).

The real reason is because you cannot cleanly define promises when combined with other definitions nor would you neccessarily want to - surprisingly.

Say a politician promises to cut taxes or boost social spending and then a natural disaster strikes or an adversary attacks. Either war or repairs and relief consume time and money. Holding them to it would force suboptimal decisions.

Money however is fundamentally fungible and performs best when it flows. Fraud being legal would force far more caution and selectivity which would do vast systemic harm. Why invest if there is no guarantee that it isn't just a gift that may be paid back?

>Lying to your partner is not a crime.

If you're intending to obtain some benefit or deprive them of something, but fail to clinch it and 'take their money' as you put it, the statement still triggers liability under most theories of fraud/misrepresentation. Generally some injury needs to be suffered, though.

So no, it's not the stealing. It's the speech with bad intention.

As a sidenote, fraud and misrepresentation generally have some of the most interesting rules regarding evidence. The law really drilled down into what's a sufficient record and what's not in respect of attribution of liability in this area.

I think you admit it’s the injury, not the lie.

No. I'm just not trying to write out half of a legal text. In the standard tort ones it's a requirement largely because of the historical requirements behind the remedies associated with the acts.

Where the offenses aren't linked to theories of compensation or restitution, but instead are based on punishment, they're less likely to require injury and more likely to look at it as a factor in determining the magnitude of the punishment.

The rules regarding fraud in connection with TARP funds, lies to federal agents, etc. all run on this line.

Tell a federal agent you aren't guilty of something when you are? That's a charge. There's no harm to the agent. No injury. Just the lie.

> unrestricted 'say anything lmao' free speech does not exist

I am baffled by everyone here talking about algorithmic platforms like Facebook and Twitter as if they are a bastion of free speech. They are designed to promote only the most engaging content (IE most outrageous and in some cases literal misinformation meant to feed on your biases).

These services are not a free marketplace of ideas, they are companies which are designed to make money. The more eyeballs on screens, the more money they make, and it is not well reasoned discussion with a diverse representation of viewpoints that keeps people glued to their devices.

Consider how you respond to someone making an incorrect statement on Twitter. You reply to them, and by replying to them you amplify the audience of the incorrect tweet. The fact that your correction causes misinformation to spread isn't a bug, it is exactly how the platform was intended to work, because it causes "engagement."

"The solution is more free speech" doesn't work here because the platforms don't have free speech and never did to begin with. All people are asking is for those platforms which currently promote outrage above organic content to sort themselves out. Not any of these strawmen about creating a "bureau of truth" or "state censorship boards" and certainly not notions of making an American KGB which I think I saw mentioned somewhere.

I have no idea of the best way to do this. Treat the negative effects of algorithmic platforms as some sort of externality? Develop strict regulation on what types of methods to keep people hooked on social media are considered ethical? Similar to how drugs or gambling are already regulated? Just straight up ban this type of business model?

It's going to be one of the big questions of the next decade. Even something like a user generated flag where if enough people press it, a tweet has a big warning over it saying "this is a contested matter" or something would be better than the current situation.

>it is not well reasoned discussion with a diverse representation of viewpoints that keeps people glued to their devices

This sounds like Hacker News. Every platform has (or: develops) it's target audience and we also can't blame the companies behind, that they are "for profit". Ads are lucrative and relatively fair (even beneficial - e.g. small businesses can make aware of their offerings... others have pointed this out before). Over time things consolidate by themselves: "We" hang out on hacker news and other likely more proper offerings. It's sad to see people "logging into facebook" and dragging down the discussion or just being offensive because of stupidity. But you can't fix that. The discussion itself and about it (discussions about discussions - meta discussions) is important to make sure "things get exposed". Things consolidate with time, e.g. you might look back on your last 10 years, and there are countless communities, where I left a last angry comment and then left. I am sure those communities are just small and irrelevant echo chambers, shrinking, because even their loudest advocates get tired and realize over time, that something is wrong, subconsciously. While others stay, though I have the feeling that there are a lot of big and relevant communities, that I still follow, and which are growing, which gives me hope, that we are heading in the right direction.

Literally no one is making the argument that it’s actual unchecked free speech.

The person you replied to was making the case that the problem is the system, which it is.

Anyone over the age of 13 understands that “say anything lmao” doesn’t exist.

  > Do you lie to your business parters in the context of a transaction? We hit you with fraud, misrepresentation, or any number of torts. Do you threaten someone with bodily harm? Oh boy. Cyberbullying? Depending on your state, that might be a problem. Lying while under oath or to a federal agent? That's potentially a few years behind bars.

...and yet, ALL of those things happen routinely and without consequence on a COLOSSAL SCALE.

Folks on HN like to pretend that laws and courts function like clockwork or computer programs, executing flawlessly and automatically. They don't. People get away with stuff ALL THE TIME. And if it does ever end up in a court, "winning" is an iffy proposition even in the best possible circumstances.

In the case of political disinformation, the problem is even more intractable. Talking heads can lie their heads off to audiences of millions of people on incredibly powerful platforms. I don't just mean "lie", I mean deliberately say a demonstrable untruth with the intention of misleading others on serious matters and be completely unaccountable for it.

There's the recent example of Trump retweeting a completely fabricated story suggesting that Biden had members of Seal Team 6 who were involved in the OBL assassination "executed". Turns out the story was "launched" from Miami Florida at the "American Priority Conference" the week before. In a few short days, a disinformation campaign was able to fabricate a completely fake story, gain 3M youtube views, and "induce" the President to retweet it to 85 Million followers. The source story was then quickly pulled from Youtube, but everyone involved (Gary Franchi, Anna Khait, Nick Noe, and others) is totally free to do it all over again. They still got their twitter, facebook and youtube platforms, RIGHT NOW, during a super tense time right before the election.

These platforms are very much "owned" platforms. They're not like newspapers but they have the same responsibility to act with some level good human judgement. Laws aren't ever going to be able to keep up with this crap.

I think one significant difference in these cases is access to alternative channels of information. Fir example when buying a property you are very highly reliant on the information you get from the vendor in making your judgement, you can hire a surveyor etc, but the owner occupier is in a uniquely privileged position. The same often goes for a party too a business transaction, especially with respect to their future intentions. In political discourse there are generally plenty of alternative sources of information and opinion though.

Also contracts and personal relationships are between two specific parties with defined responsibilities, but voting is not as direct and specific as that.

No - it's "there should be no line at all". Even a minor concession is the beginning of a total defeat.

In all of those instances you listed there are circumstances above and beyond the contextual meaning of free-speech in the above posters reply.

Your first sentence is obviously ridiculous given the examples the poster gave. I don’t know what the second sentence even means.

The issue with restricting speech is selective enforcement, often based on political ideology.