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Comment by manfredo | Hacker News Reader

Is a whiteboard political? If I buy a whiteboard from Staples, and draw a confederate flag and some hate speech it does not get erased automatically. Have the whiteboard manufacturers made a political statement because their products do not censor hate speech?

I'm skeptical of this claim they everything is political. A forum they hosted any and all content will definitely host political speech, but those are the politics of the users not the site. Your kind of rhetoric seems like an attempt to say that hosting something is equivalent to an endorsement of it. This is not at all the case.

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If content is posted onto a site that is obviously hateful, the site has the choice to keep it up or take it down. The outcome of that choice is a political act (to not act is to act). The severity of the hate speech might matter, but ultimately regardless of which path they take, they've taken a path.

In your whiteboard analogy, if you were giving an interview to a candidate and walked into a meeting room that had a swastika on a whiteboard and opted not to erase it, as a candidate I would assume that was an endorsement.

Not taking a side is taking the side of whoever is being most aggressive. "I don't want to get involved" is getting involved.

Someday people will realize that there is something called laws and law enforcement.. till that day tech companies can keep playing that part..

What do laws have to do with this?

Not getting involved is not getting involved. You might take this as an indirect endorsement of content. But by that logic, a site with no moderation simultaneously liberal, conservative, and centrist because all are allowed. I guess you can say that it's political, but because it allows all content it's political nature is all-encompassing. Calling a completely apolitical stance political is sort of like calling Atheism a religion. It's arguably correct but it's really the absence of religion.

Also, I think your whiteboard with a swatstika analogy demonstrates the shortsightedness of this sort of "inaction is endorsement" line of thinking. What about a candidate who's family was personally affected by the Holocaust and is so mortified to see the swatstika that they are too uncomfortable to even do anything about it? What about a South Asian candidate for whom the symbol doesn't elicit a reaction because of it's prevalence in South Asian culture? Or what about a candidate who thinks, "the people at this company definitely aren't Nazis, clearly this was part of diagram or something."

> Not getting involved is not getting involved.

No.

> But by that logic, a site with no moderation simultaneously liberal, conservative, and centrist because all are allowed.

We aren't (and haven't been) talking about political ideals, but hate speech. A website that doesn't take action on hate speech is allowing and condoning hate speech.

> Calling a completely apolitical stance political is sort of like calling Atheism a religion. It's arguably correct but it's really the absence of religion.

We're not talking about apolitical stances like "I like chocolate." We're talking about hate speech, which is implicitly political.

> Also, I think your whiteboard with a swatstika analogy demonstrates the shortsightedness of this sort of "inaction is endorsement" line of thinking. What about a candidate who's family was personally affected by the Holocaust and is so mortified to see the swatstika that they are too uncomfortable to even do anything about it?

Isn't this just even more evidence to suggest that an employee not taking action is an action itself?

What-aboutism is great, but it doesn't really matter in this context, right? "What about a candidate who's blind" etc etc. I defined a hypothetical scenario to prove a point in response to the above hypothetical scenario.

Reducing the scope to content you categorize as "hate speech" doesn't change the problems with trying to claim that refusal to remove content condoning that content. Say group X posts content proclaiming superiority over group Y. And group Y also posts content proclaiming superiority over group X. Say website does not take action on either instance of hate speech. It would follow that the website is condoning two contradictory views.

The reality is that hosting content is not condoning it. An approach of "we're treating this like a whiteboard, we are not going to be involved in taking action against particular content" isn't an endorsement of anything. Whatever objectionable content someone might post, another person could post the complete opposite.

Not getting involved is exactly that: not getting involved. Ultimately, this claim that refusal to take action against hate speech is the same "inaction with respect to _____ is condoning ______" rhetoric that's been trotted out time and time again. At best, it's a misguided effort to inspire opposition to harmful views.

People don’t change their opinions on the internet, so I’m not going to change your mind. This just such an upset tingly misguided stance it’s hard to even brush it off. I’m unsure what the negative side effect of suggesting opposition to harmful views, but that’s on you I guess.

There are entire books discussing whether inaction is action, so that debate is clearly not getting solved here. I just ask, how do you think Facebook’s stance (the same as yours) is working out?

> People don’t change their opinions on the internet, so I’m not going to change your mind. This just such an upset tingly misguided stance it’s hard to even brush it off.

I would say the exact same thing regarding your misguided claim that refusal to censor content amounts to endorsement of it.

> I’m unsure what the negative side effect of suggesting opposition to harmful views, but that’s on you I guess.

Where did I write that there are negative side effects of removing content? All I wanted to dispel is the false claim that lack of censorship is a political stance.

> I just ask, how do you think Facebook’s stance (the same as yours) is working out?

Where do you get the idea that Facebook doesn't remove hate speech? Their content policies are easily found via Google: https://m.facebook.com/communitystandards/hate_speech

>Is a whiteboard political? If I buy a whiteboard from Staples, and draw a confederate flag and some hate speech it does not get erased automatically. Have the whiteboard manufacturers made a political statement because their products do not censor hate speech?

Considering that in that case you are the "moderator and owner" of that white board, yes it would be a political action if you decide to remove or not the confederate flag. That's without getting into the fact that the whiteboard didn't come from the ether and it's production, sale and all processes that compose the two are, also in some manner, political.

Where was the whiteboard manufactured? Did the frame use Canadian aluminum?

Then there is that pesky issue of it being a Whiteboard.

Most stuff from canada comes in white these days. The country is litterally covered in snow at the moment.

I am a policy person by trade, I will say that there is a quote “you cannot separate politics from administration” this is a public sector term but I think it applies to any admin functions of a business. I also think politics (more accurate policy, regulatory, and administrative law) would play a huge role in making a white board due to compliance requirements. But maybe not in the way you say.

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