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Comment by save_ferris | Hacker News Reader

> The case started with an April 2016 Facebook post, in which a user shared an article featuring a photo of Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, then-chair of Austria’s Green Party, along with commentary labeling her a “lousy traitor,” “corrupt oaf,” and member of a “fascist party,” apparently in response to her immigration policies. This is core, protected speech in the United States. But it was deemed defamation under Austrian law.

This reminds me of the reporting done regarding Larry Pozner[0], a father of a Sandy Hook shooting victim that was subjected to constant accusations, doxxing attempts and death threats from conspiracy theorists for years and decided to take legal action.

Fundamentally, I believe that everyone has the right to not be subjected to death threats and systemic harassment from hate and conspiracy groups, especially those who've lost children to such senseless and brutal killing. American individualism so often deflects the responsibility of dealing with such trauma on those who are subjected to this kind of harassment because it's not impacting the vast majority of the population ("not my problem").

It's clear that much of the Western world have had much stricter free speech laws than the US does for decades, but somehow they don't devolve into the Orwellian nightmare that we always fear when we talk about limiting free speech. In fact, has there been another Western democracy more tested and compared to Orwell's 1984 in the last 5 years than the US?

I don't know what the exact solution to these problems is, but I truly people need to be responsible for what they post online. We as a society also have a responsibility to demand that of our peers because big tech has already shown us that they're not up to this challenge. The worse that harassment gets online, I believe the more segmented and walled off and commercialized the internet will become.

0: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/670/beware-the-jabberwock/a...

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> It's clear that much of the Western world have had much stricter free speech laws than the US does for decades, but somehow they don't devolve into the Orwellian nightmare that we always fear when we talk about limiting free speech.

They are though. You must not have been paying attention.

In the UK we are locking up 7 people a day over "hate speech". The most egergious example is the Chelsea Russell case.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921

These laws were sold to us under the guise of "Locking up Islamic Extremists". Now we are putting ankle braclets on 17 year old girls for posting gangsta rap lyrics.

We also have the "Non Crime Hate Incident". Where you can be put on a naughty list for saying the wrong thing on twitter. These can stop you from finding employment as you will show up on a background check. You have broken no law but you are treated as if you have.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-51501202

He won in court. But they wouldn't actually review the legislation which is the real problem.

Comedians have been investigated for making jokes about Turkish politicians.

https://www.dw.com/en/turkey-asks-germany-to-prosecute-comed...

You are foolish if these laws won't be used against the population at large. Look up the term "Anarcho Tyranny".

Do you really think the https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 case is egregious? The punishment is meaningful, but hardly life or career changing. Just because something has been said in rap lyrics does not mean it's OK to say in all contexts. Do you know the context and what she said? Surely it's conceivable that what she said really was harmful to community. Consider why free speech exists: to protect public debate and essentially hold up the light of transparency to power - clearly there's no trivially obvious line to draw that will protect only that speech, nor a trivially obvious line to draw that will protect all non-harmful speech. So when a society, in a healthy debate not too different to the one we're having now chooses to draw the line somewhere between those too extremes: that's just fine. Personally, I think the US protects speech that simply undermines society (and the US), and that doing so is at worst self-destructive, and at best irrelevant. Yes, we need to protect speech - but we don't need to pretend the line between constructive speech and hate speech is terribly subtle, nor that there is going to be some kind of chilling effect from rules like this. Do you feel threatened by this court outcome? No, right?

I do agree that some of the laws are bad, for instance the law in Germany that protected Turkish politicians from well-deserved criticism. As I hear it, they think that in Germany too: this law isn't some new development by thought-controller wannabe's, it's a bad law on the books that's rarely enforced and that's quite-old; pre WW2. Put in on the pile of failings of the Weimar republic. It's not a small pile.

Regardless, though bad laws should be repealed the larger point stands: these countries have not devolved into Orwellian nightmares. If anything, the real threat isn't Orwell's 1984, it's A Brave New World: a populace that chooses to close its eyes to the truth by simple social feedback loops that reinforce groupthink as opposed to critical examination. If you like literary references, we need to remove our machine-learned equivalent's of Dr. Strangelove's CRM 114 discriminators. To protect discourse, we need to shape the environment it happens in to steer those feedback loops away from outrage-inducing echo chambers that filter our perception of the world to distinguish us from politically others -and instead towards truth-enhancing critical thought. Ideally, all without a central, abusable source of power: sure! But the alternative shouldn't be that we're all forced to inhabit balkanized bubbles of media, carefully curated to be free of all of those pesky facts that might undermine a firmly held opinion.

> Do you really think the https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 case is egregious? The punishment is meaningful, but hardly life or career changing. Just because something has been said in rap lyrics does not mean it's OK to say in all contexts. Do you know the context and what she said? Surely it's conceivable that what she said really was harmful to community.

All you are doing is rationalising putting an Ankle braclet on a 17 year old girl because she posted some rap lyrics to face book. There wasn't a violent act, theft or anything that is actually harmful happened.

This nebulous "harmed the community" can be used as an excuse to curtail any of your freedoms. You could say "These homosexuals are harming the community, therefore we can remove them from it".

> Consider why free speech exists: to protect public debate and essentially hold up the light of transparency to power - clearly there's no trivially obvious line to draw that will protect only that speech, nor a trivially obvious line to draw that will protect all non-harmful speech. So when a society, in a healthy debate not too different to the one we're having now chooses to draw the line somewhere between those too extremes: that's just fine. Personally, I think the US protects speech that simply undermines society (and the US), and that doing so is at worst self-destructive, and at best irrelevant. Yes, we need to protect speech - but we don't need to pretend the line between constructive speech and hate speech is terribly subtle, nor that there is going to be some kind of chilling effect from rules like this. Do you feel threatened by this court outcome? No, right?

We didn't choose to draw the line though. The legislation was pushed through in the mid-2000s because of terrorists bombings (by Islamists) in the UK.

The law keeps on being expanded to include more and more trivial things. IIRC A man was arrested for looking through a shop window too oddly.

Once you allow any curtail of speech there will be calls to curtail more of it for the "public good".

> Regardless, though bad laws should be repealed the larger point stands: these countries have not devolved into Orwellian nightmares.

They are locking people up for speech and investigating jokes. So yes they have.

Communication can do harm. It can also do good. That's kind of the point of protecting it - it's got power. If it were powerless, then fraud, misinformation campaigns, copyright infringement, insider trading, leaks of classified info, selling trade secrets, and online bullying etc would be irrelevant, but they're not; they have impacts. To be clear: I'm not saying that all of those are worth preventing regardless of circumstances.

I'm not weighing in on the BBC reported case because all the relevant details are omitted. But in principle I support the notion those that do harm should be held to account; and without knowing the details, the 8 weeks of curfew don't sound necessarily implausible. Of course, laws can be excessive; that's for sure, but even if this one were (I don't have the details, and a sample size of 1 isn't something to draw conclusions from regardless) - that's merely an argument to be more reasonable, not to leave all harm entirely unpunished. Superficially: sure, it sounds unreasonable to give a teenager 8 weeks of curfew and a considerable 500 pound fine for something they said online. But I don't know the details; so I'm not sure what to make of that.

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> We didn't choose to draw the line though. The legislation was pushed through in the mid-2000s because of terrorists bombings (by Islamists) in the UK.

Yeah, that's society deciding to draw the line. Your use of the passive voice is notable, but I don't think think it's wise to think of this as a passive choice - a democratically elected parliament chose to write that act, and subsequent parliaments left it in place, by choice. It may well be a bad law - and many such laws are terrible; as are many other laws. But they're fundamentally the people's responsibility, and failing to own up to that responsibility is essentially giving up on democracy.

It would be lovely if we could live in the world in which all speech was good and none harmful. That would make all this super easy! But harms from communication do arise, and we need to deal with them.

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> > Regardless, though bad laws should be repealed the larger point stands: these countries have not devolved into Orwellian nightmares.

> They are locking people up for speech and investigating jokes. So yes they have.

The point of an Orwellian police state is to exercise (draconian) control. It is not enough for some isolated incident to occur.

In fact, I'll argue the opposite: that the world you would effectively help to create by rejecting such laws categorically is much closer to Orwellian than one in which we to work to avoid harmful statements. Because one central theme of the book is doublespeak, and in general the creation of alternative truths, and the hiding of real truths via misinformation. And that's exactly the world we're descending into. We should aim to prevent that, not to work toward that goal all while honestly, yet ironically claiming to be protecting free speech. It won't end well.

When you argue that some laws restricting speech have harmful consequences, I'll vigorously agree. When you argue that a free and open debate is one of the essential components of a functioning democracy, I'll vigorously agree. You're totally right!

But I also want to re-emphasize that the choices are not binary, nor trivial, nor that we should be aiming for centralized control of speech. I don't want to live in a police state, any more than you! But just because some laws aiming to prevent harmful speech miss their mark does not mean laws aiming to protect it cannot also miss their mark. Ideally, we'd acknowledge that we have a problem, and look for solutions that mitigate the doublespeak and disinformation while being difficult to centrally control, and avoiding draconian punishments too. We should be looking for self-reinforcing positive feedback loops, not direct control - that prevents most of the risks of direct punishment of speech, while hopefully still achieving some of the aims. And the first step along that process is having a frank discussion about this problem in the first place, and that's what we're struggling with as a society now.

> Communication can do harm. It can also do good. That's kind of the point of protecting it - it's got power. If it were powerless, then fraud, misinformation campaigns, copyright infringement, insider trading, leaks of classified info, selling trade secrets, and online bullying etc would be irrelevant, but they're not; they have impacts. To be clear: I'm not saying that all of those are worth preventing regardless of circumstances.

You protect communication by letting people communicate freely. As for "misinformation", well free speech has you covered. You can use your voice to correct that mis-information. As for "online bullying". You know how you stop online bullying? You log out of social media and it ends.

The others you have listed already have existing legislation that covers them. It doesn't need speech controls or controls over lines of communication.

> I'm not weighing in on the BBC reported case because all the relevant details are omitted. But in principle I support the notion those that do harm should be held to account; and without knowing the details, the 8 weeks of curfew don't sound necessarily implausible. Of course, laws can be excessive; that's for sure, but even if this one were (I don't have the details, and a sample size of 1 isn't something to draw conclusions from regardless) - that's merely an argument to be more reasonable, not to leave all harm entirely unpunished. Superficially: sure, it sounds unreasonable to give a teenager 8 weeks of curfew and a considerable 500 pound fine for something they said online. But I don't know the details; so I'm not sure what to make of that.

What you should make of it. Is that you can be fined, prosecuted and even put in prison for shitposting on facebook. That is ridiculous. Anything else is apologetics for laws that shouldn't exist.

People won these freedoms over hundreds of years of social progress. But lets throw it all away because might have upset somoene else online.

> Yeah, that's society deciding to draw the line. Your use of the passive voice is notable, but I don't think think it's wise to think of this as a passive choice - a democratically elected parliament chose to write that act, and subsequent parliaments left it in place, by choice. It may well be a bad law - and many such laws are terrible; as are many other laws. But they're fundamentally the people's responsibility, and failing to own up to that responsibility is essentially giving up on democracy.

I have no idea what a "passive voice" is. All you are doing it making a case against democracy in my eyes (Democracy is considered by some to be soft-communism, but that is on the extreme side of libertarism/anarcho-capitalist circles however this view isn't without some merit). If you rights can be simply be voted away by your representatives that doesn't preserve liberty.

I am soo sick of people like yourself that will just excuse away rights violations because represntatives voted for it. If everyone voted to kill all the Jews or Homosexuals in a country does it make it okay? Obviously not. What you are doing is more apologetics for laws that shouldn't exist.

Everyone should be allowed to say what they like. The only exceptions I might grant you are calls to violence.

> But I also want to re-emphasize that the choices are not binary, nor trivial, nor that we should be aiming for centralized control of speech. I don't want to live in a police state, any more than you! But just because some laws aiming to prevent harmful speech miss their mark does not mean laws aiming to protect it cannot also miss their mark. Ideally, we'd acknowledge that we have a problem, and look for solutions that mitigate the doublespeak and disinformation while being difficult to centrally control, and avoiding draconian punishments too. We should be looking for self-reinforcing positive feedback loops, not direct control - that prevents most of the risks of direct punishment of speech, while hopefully still achieving some of the aims. And the first step along that process is having a frank discussion about this problem in the first place, and that's what we're struggling with as a society now.

There is no such thing as harmful speech. It is a made up thing with no proper defintion that is used to suppress dissisent of the populace against the state (which normally collude with the rich). Speech is not violence and never will be.

To clear up minor details:

> I have no idea what a "passive voice" is.

A passive voice is just grammatical term to describe phrases in which the acted-upon is primary, as opposed to the actor; i.e. "Freddy was tackled by Hank" is in passive voice, where "Hank tackled Freddy" is in active voice. (for a better explanation, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_voice)

---

Misinformation is harmful because it people can either believe it, or decide to try and stop believing honest communication more generally because they know they don't have the chance to distinguish fact from fiction. This basic principle motivates things like fraud and libel statutes, and why it's illegal to e.g. lie to congress, a judge, and sometimes even the police.

You can not correct misinformation simply by using your voice; essentially that's equivalent to a shouting match, and people are already shouting as loud as they can. Additionally, since it's easy to lie (no need to make any effort to actually find supporting data, after all), and since lies tend to be remarkable and shocking, they're amplified by media (social media in particular).

Similarly, you cannot prevent online bullying by just signing off social platforms; to the contrary, that's submitting to the bullying, since such platforms are of value to their users. Victims should take reasonable precautions, sure, but clearly they don't deserve the sole responsibility for being bullied.

I think your arguments might make sense in a world in which freedom of speech implied the freedom to force others to listen to reponses; perhaps in that (itself pretty nighmarish) hypothetical society you really could correct misinformation by reponding - but it's not a place anybody would want to live in, right? In the real world, freedom of speech does not provide an antidote to misinformation.

If you believe there is no such thing as harmful speech, why do we punish fraud? Why punish those leaking classified state secrets? Why punish those committing libel? Is fraud harmless? Why have truth-in-advertising principles? Why prohibit lying to a judge, police officer, or congress? Why even limit trademark infringement?

> has there been another Western democracy more tested and compared to Orwell's 1984 in the last 5 years than the US?

None of those people are in jail. And that regime, despite its best efforts, is being peacefully removed from power.

America is the world’s oldest [EDIT: large, old] extant democracy. I wouldn’t lightly consider toying with something so basic as free speech. Several European and Asian democracies are already teetering towards authoritarianism, the first step of which is curtailing public debate.

> America is the world’s oldest extant democracy.

That would be San Marino.

The U.S. Constitution is the oldest constitution still in force. But we're still pretty young as democracies go. Hell, we haven't even been around as long as one of the first libertarian states, the Icelandic Commonwealth, was.

San Marino has only been a democracy since, what, after the Italian revolution? It is a uniquely old microstate, though.

(Another line of counter-argument is that the US wasn't a democracy until the civil rights act...)

> America is the world’s oldest [EDIT: large, old] extant democracy.

Nothing about our history guarantees our future as a democracy, this is hot hand fallacy at its finest. If there's one thing that's consistent across human history, civilizations always fail at some point.

> I wouldn’t lightly consider toying with something so basic as free speech. Several European and Asian democracies are already teetering towards authoritarianism, the first step of which is curtailing public debate.

Free speech existed prior to the internet, it's not like Tim Berners-Lee changes the world and all of a sudden free speech exists. Canada has much stricter free speech laws than the US and their political discourse seems to be just fine. Plus there are already plenty of restrictions baked into "free speech" online. You can't threaten to shoot up a school on social media without consequences, why can't the same principles be applied to people who make death threats towards individuals? Companies already have the ability to lock you out of your account for no reason whatsoever without any defined arbitration system. What about the internet is so truly sacrosanct that we permit such inconsistency from corporate governance while railing against legal protections mandated by governments? Free speech is already being messed with; it's being used to automate the virality of hate speech with ruthless efficiency.

> hot hand fallacy at its finest.

Interesting choice of analogy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_hand#Recent_research_in_su...

Hot hand "fallacy" is only fallacious if cross-event outcomes are unrelated. Back in reality, neither hot hand nor reverse gambler's are actually fallacious.

I just don't see the equivalence here. I agree that platforms have a responsibility not to enable harassment and death threats, but calling a politician "traitor", "corrupt", "fascist" is neither of those things. What are you supposed to do when a politician is corrupt or fascist, if you aren't allowed to talk about it?

Politicians can only be good or neutral.

> What are you supposed to do when a politician is corrupt or fascist, if you aren't allowed to talk about it?

In the same country (Austria) a court actually ruled that a certain right-wing politician can be said to be close to nazi ideology due to the existing evidence.

So, you are allowed to talk about it, but you might get problems if you don't have a basis for your claims.

So in Austria you're not allowed to insult a politician unless a court agrees with your insult? That's incredibly fascist.

This isn't specific to politicians. Calling someone a fascist in public(meaning 10+ witnesses I think) is considered defamation and, yes, if you cannot prove such claims it can have consequences.

Note that this does not apply to just any kind of insult as you say. It's for cases when it's considered harmful for one's public image, as usual with defamation. I've never heard of a simple "Idiot!" leading to any consequences. I don't know why it's "incredibly fascist" to win a defamation case when someone called you a fascist in the open. Though I do admit that it's hard to draw a clear line with these things, and there are arguments for both sides as long as it doesn't steer towards censorship.

These things could easily end up in ECHR, because a "fascist", just like an "idiot", could be considered an opinion, judgement, not a fact and so it cannot be false, unless it means something very specific in Austria.

It doesn't mean anything else in Austria, but do keep in mind Austria as well as Germany is still sensitive about such topics due to their past, which is also why denying the holocaust or doing the Hitler salute is illegal.

Which doesn't mean there aren't some stupid, backwards laws that have no place in today's society, like for example the blasphemy law which weirdly still exists. There will always be room for improvement and it's never wrong to question established rules.

When courts gatekeep criticism of politicians, that is fascist. Austria's history of fascism makes this even worse, since they of all people should know better.

Stop arguing with a false premise.

The issue here is whether courts in Austria have the right to constrain people's public statements to some standard of demonstrable truthfulness, or not.

From the Western viewpoint the answer is clearly no, but Austria will keep walking down that path regardless of whether it's morally right.

That's simply not true; including in the US. Libel statutes make distinctions between true and false statements, and between knowingly misleading statements and honest mistakes. Do you think truth should be irrelevant? I don't think society is stable under those conditions, but certainly that's not the law now.

There's no meaningful slippery slope here either; because the vast majority of cases don't involve anything questionably true, they clearly involve statements that have evidence or do not, and where there's doubt, the protections are generally fairly solid (this is in the news often enough too; witness how Musk's knowingly false and clearly negative "pedo guy" comment was still not ruled defamation).

What's worse is the fact that you don't need to win a defamation lawsuit to punish someone if you're much wealthier than the defendant, because too many jurisdictions let each side pay their own legal costs - such that those wanting to stifle dissent can often simply threaten legal action, even knowing full well they'd lose. The point doesn't need to be to win, the point can simply be to impose costs that are felt unevenly.

Public insults for the sake of insulting someone should be punished in an age where common sense is almost gone. Even more so when appellatives that can seriously ruin someone's image like fascist, racist, antisemitist (etc) are thrown around. Politician or not is irrelevant.

In an age where common sense is almost gone, I'm pretty reluctant to say that insults should be punished. Because, you know, that punishment is going to be applied without much common sense. So it's going to be applied much more broadly than it should, and in situations where it doesn't fit, and it's going to ruin peoples' lives.

The law forbids knowingly making false and defamatory statements that could lead to persecution of the accused person.

So for example, you can't accuse someone of being a rapist, for example, if you know that the accusation is not true.

Similarly, you can't accuse a politician of being corrupt just because you don't like them if you don't have any reason to believe that your accusation is true.

But it's absolutely allowed to publically insult a politician. And you also have the right to call a politician corrupt if you have a reason to believe that they are.

For example, I know that calling our former finance minister a corrupt self-serving asshole is not going to get me into trouble because there have been multiple news reports about him taking bribes.

I think for Americans it's just hard to believe that we don't protect made up lies as "free speech" around here.

I closely associate calling someone a "traitor" with a threat of death.

Its history up to the modern day makes it equivalent to a statement that your opponent should be killed for their opposition. National politicians will certainly see that as a specific threat.

Jo Cox (UK Member of Parliament) was murdered in 2016 by someone repeating claims that she was a "traitor".

That makes sense. I don't have that association, since the term "traitor" gets tossed around all the time in American politics, but I can definitely see how it would come across as a threat in an environment where it's not commonly used.

Funny to see this comment in a thread about a European regulator attempting to censor, worldwide, criticism of some politician.

I mean, I'm sure there are many things about Austrian politics which are less than ideal, but I'm not convinced a lawsuit and series of appeals taking three years to decide that a claim that a Green Party member was a fascist and a traitor was defamatory was quite the dystopia Orwell had in mind. (And Orwell lived in a country with strong libel laws, which his publisher was constantly worried about his own writings falling foul of and he was very happy to encourage his publisher to worry about more when the libellous comments were made abut him)

> has there been another Western democracy more tested and compared to Orwell's 1984 in the last 5 years than the US?

There have been probing tests of the nature of free speech laws in a number of countries outside the US in recent years, notably the potential transgender pronoun compulsion laws that landed Jordan Peterson in trouble in Canada, as well as a number of tried or in trial cases in places like the UK[0] and Australia[1]. It's a difficult line to draw, as threats of violence and general harassment clearly shouldn't be allowed or tolerated. I'm not sure the trend that these other Western nations are attempting to follow is necessarily good either though, as some veer dangerously close to thought policing.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925 [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2018/dec/27/battle-lines-dra...

> notably the potential transgender pronoun compulsion laws

Which, in my opinion, go clearly a step farther than just censoring offensive language. I can understand the latter to some degree, but forcing people to replace certain words in their communication only differs from Orwell's dystopia in the size of the dictionary.

It's a dilemma: huge communities like Facebook cannot really be moderated effectively and are a fertile ground for disinformation, conspiracy theories and spreading hate. At the same time we don't want to limit speech more than absolutely necessary.

To me it's clear we simply are not (yet?) mentally prepared for information exchange and communities in this global magnitude. It can be positive when followers of a niche hobby can get together, but the same mechanism is dangerous in contact with targeted disinformation campaigns and cults.

> but forcing people to replace certain words in their communication only differs from Orwell's dystopia in the size of the dictionary.

It's dystopian that people can't hurl the N-word at each other?

But they absolutely can hurl the N-word at each other. It is frowned upon for good reason, but it's not illegal.

What I was talking about was the proposal to actually force people to refer to others by their preferred pronouns. I am not against new pronouns, but the government should not enforce such a change in how people communicate. Language evolves naturally with society, not the other way around. Also there's enough evidence that banning bad words does not work and people always find a new way to piss off others. After all it's the symptom, not the cause.

Is there such a proposal? What does it actually say? I'm asking because gender recognition acts have been systematically misrepresented by the media.

In my country, you're not allowed to use the N-Word on purpose as an insult.

In Canada, you're not allowed to misgender people on purpose to harass them. You can not use their pronouns at all, or you can use wrong pronouns by accident, but you can't use someone's wrong pronouns repeatedly on purpose to harass them.

It's not anymore compelled speech than disallowing people from using the n word for the purpose of harassment.

taboo words and acts are defined by the moral majority. 15 years ago that same moral majority believed i didn't deserve the right to be married, we are still well within living memory of a time when it was entirely acceptable to call someone a nigger but two men who kissed were liable to lose their jobs. free speech is the most fundamental tool we have for ensuring equal rights and dignity. that is worth far more than getting rid of a few marginal edgelords.

you know what else is fertile ground for disinformation and conspiracy theories? literally every single protest i have ever attended. and yet we recognize that the right to assembly far outweighs the impact of a couple schizoid burnouts talking about tower 7 and the zog. the same is true of the internet.

a censorship regime will not make people any more prepared to handle free and open discourse, it will only enable those in power to further marginalize those who aren't. imo what is vitally needed is education on media literacy, this should be considered just as important as history or civics. give people the tools for growth.

For many of us beeing not allowed to blame people with specific (usually way to generalized) slurs does not exactly lessen our ability for free speech. Imo this perception is only drawn on us by americans.

Politicians are public figures, if someone wants to call them a 'traitor' and/or 'oaf' to their friends, that's fine.

If people are harassing each other, well, there are laws for that too.

Fundamentally, I believe that everyone has the right to not be subjected to death threats and systemic harassment from hate and conspiracy groups

I've thought about this problem and there may be solutions (and even profitable business) based on existing harassment laws, but AFAIK no one has tried it. Imagine scaling the Hulk Hogan lawsuit using "copyright troll" style tactics. This could create a "scared straight" deterrent effect on harmful social media.

> but (...) truly people need to be responsible for what they post online.

I strongly disagree. Anonymity is an important and integral part of the internet and the free speech it enables. Moving towards this sort of thing will only be used for abuse and censorship. It saddens me how much this has become an accepted position, even on hn, and I'm quite tired of all the justifications for giving up important rights, anonymity is closely related to privacy for example, just because of some scarey boogeyman of the day.

Anonymity offers the ability to criticize entities (governments, corporations, people), to communicate in ways more freely than otherwise, to discuss personal issues without fear, to have a presence online without stalkers or other abusers attack, it also avoids the most common rhetorical abuse I see, which is overreliance on argument from authority by separating the identity of the person making the argument from the argument itself, and I could go on. I could go on...

Do you really think the vast amount of negatives that come with your proposal would be worth the tradeoff?

https://youtu.be/sKOk4Y4inVY?t=518 [1]

1. "In 1995, there was a debate at Harvard Law School – four of us discussing the future of public key encryption and its control. I was on the side, I suppose, of freedom. It’s where I try to be. With me at that debate was a man called Daniel Weitzner who now works in the White House making Internet policy for the Obama administration.

On the other side was the then Deputy Attorney General of the United States and a lawyer in private practice named Stewart Baker who had been chief council to the National Security Agency, our listeners, and who was then in private life helping businesses to deal with the listeners. He then became, later on, the deputy for policy planning in the Department of Homeland Security in the United States and has much to do with what happened in our network after 2001.

At any rate, the four of us spent two pleasant hours debating the right to encrypt and at the end there was a little dinner party at the Harvard faculty club, and at the end, after all the food had been taken away and just the port and the walnuts were left on the table, Stuart said, “All right, among us now that we are all in private, just us girls, I’ll let our hair down.”

He didn’t have much hair even then, but he let it down.

“We are not going to prosecute your client, Mr. Zimmermann," he said. “Public key encryption will become available. We fought a long, losing battle against it, but it was just a delaying tactic.” And then he looked around the room and he said, ”But nobody cares about anonymity, do they?"

And a cold chill went up my spine and I thought, all right, Stuart, and now I know you’re going to spend the next twenty years trying to eliminate anonymity in human society and I am going to try to stop you and we’ll see how it goes.

And it’s going badly. We didn’t build the net with anonymity built in. That was a mistake. Now we are paying for it." -Eben Moglen

The arguments that the kind of speech referred to in the article is worth defending are really weak. Sure: there is no question that free speech in general is a useful tool in increasing transparency and thus public enlightenment - thus protections in general aren't in question. Yet the defenders of absolute or unconditional protection repeatedly - as in this article - make remarkably poorly supported claims.

The first poorly supported claim is that because it's supported in the US, it's worth supporting. This is just weird; frankly. If US laws were perfect, society would be a lot more stable, and you might as well abolish congress. Clearly, laws are not perfect; and where there are regional legal differences, you should not assume the US protections make sense - nor in fact that either approach makes sense. It's frankly irrelevant what US law is on the topic of what protected speech should be.

The second, and more fundamental error in reasoning is that somehow a slippery slope applies, or by extension that you can't expect a court (or other control mechanism) to be able to tell harmful speech from constructive speech. Obviously, there will be some corner-cases where decisions will be essentially arbitrary - but that applies in any system, including the US. But what's not at all obvious is that those close calls actually happen very often, nor that they matter much when they do. There's usually wide, clear distinction between what's essentially malicious deception (as in this case) and possible truths that deserve protection. In practice it just doesn't happen all that often that something is possibly both. Here too: you could argue whether or not the posts in question are harmful enough to deserve a ban; but there's no argument that they were truthful and worth protecting; they clearly were not. To summarize: the idea that legal controls on deception or defamation will to a meaningful extent do collateral damage to free speech which increases transparency simply does not appear to be true. Sure, a despot could do both, but a normal society can choose not to do that just fine too.

The third (implicit) reasoning flaw is that what we have today is actually free speech. This misunderstanding rests on several pillars. Firstly we should not ignore harms caused by libel laws, especially in a country like the US, where legal costs can be punishment alone, regardless of legal victory, and where legal standards differ by state allowing jurisdiction shopping. Secondly, we should realize that speech needs protection from power in general, not specifically government alone. Much later modern-style free speech developed into a roughly modern form, corporations evolved. Corporations may deserve some protection from the government, but they themselves wield enormous power too, and speech needs protection from their interference too. Finally, the protections we do have are quite... abstract. They're not sufficient to protect speech in practice, not by a long shot - just witness how abominably whistle-blowers are treated. Rather than the essence of communication and transparency being protected, we protect technicalities. We may not technically live under a massive censorship regime, but that's just because we've interpreted self-censorship and corporate control as being something fundamentally different - and that's dangerous, because we're not protecting speech as some kind of academic exercise to create aesthetically pleasing laws; we're doing it to protect public discourse and transparency. And we're not doing that as is.

We really need to move towards a healthy debate on free speech itself. The principle is clearly sound, but our implementation of it is equally clearly not sound. And that holds true just as much in other countries; this isn't some US-specific problem - because pretty much anywhere in the west it's OK to lie about (say) vaccine dangers without any repercussions even though evidence-free conspiracies of that kind do real harm to everyone in society. Yet if you defame someone - just one person! Well, that's apparently not OK, we need to protect individuals from libel? Even if there's any sense in that (I doubt it), it sure doesn't appear to do us much good regardless. There's a reason why e.g. plutocrats such as Putin thought it was worth interfering in foreign public opinion: precisely because he thought freedom of speech does not work well in the countries he tried to manipulate; freedom of speech would not prevent malicious lies from spreading through the public. And you know what? Putin's right.

As such, while it's fair contrast the US approach to that of others, I think doing so is akin to worrying about really marginal issues (e.g. exactly where to draw the line between defamation of a politician vs. protected opinions about that politician just doesn't matter much: there are lots of possible lines, and most are just fine). The more fundamental issues are broadly similar - and deeply unhealthy - in all western countries.

> American individualism so often deflects the responsibility of dealing with such trauma on those who are subjected to this kind of harassment because it's not impacting the vast majority of the population ("not my problem").

It's not individualism, it's constitutional rights. The idea of american individualism is not true. We are a collectivist people - racial, native vs foreign born, protestant vs catholic, confederates vs union, etc.

> but somehow they don't devolve into the Orwellian nightmare that we always fear when we talk about limiting free speech.

Don't they arrest people for their dog's salute or symbols right? Europe is far closer to orwellian nightmare than the US I'd say.

> In fact, has there been another Western democracy more tested and compared to Orwell's 1984 in the last 5 years than the US?

"Last five years". And what happened?

> The worse that harassment gets online, I believe the more segmented and walled off and commercialized the internet will become.

No. As sneaky politically driven people use the death of children to demand censorship, that's when the internet will become more segmented, walled off and commercialized.

People like you are why there is ever more censorship, segmentation and commercialization. Clutching your pearls and screaming about the children while you only care about political censorship. Do you ever clutch your pearls and cry over the millions of children who are killed in wars? Or do you only cry for them when they serve your political agenda? It can't be an accident that in the last few years, a small but vocal contingent has used dead children at every opportunity to push for more censorship.

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