Hacker News Reader

Comment by branon | Hacker News Reader

Censorship for any reason is disappointing.

Unless you mean you're disappointed that the president has said something so egregious they've been forced to censor him, I really have no idea where you're coming from. He's inciting an armed mob to storm the seat of the US government. Where would you draw the line?

i believe at least one the tweets they deleted were calls for people to calm down and leave, that seems like the opposite of incitement.

>Where would you draw the line?

no line. representatives have chosen not to represent their constituents, at a certain point it needs to be clear that if you can't keep your promises, ignore the needs and concerns of the public while holding them in contempt, this is the only possible outcome. censorship cannot solve this problem, only effective governance can.

When you say no line, you believe there are no limts to free speech?

it wouldn't be free speech if there were. the first amendment was written by a group of seditious traitors who rebelled against the state. speech is not a tool for preserving the state, it exists to protect the people.

We have a more fundamental disagreement than tweets in that case. If anyone should be allowed to post anything, what about images of child pornography?

do you arrest a bank robber for double parking? there is a fundamental difference in my eyes between prosecuting speech and prosecuting damage. people lie incessantly every single day, not all of those lies are criminally libelous, but when they are, the issue at hand is the resulting material damage. with child pornography this is even more straightforward. the creation of cp is inherently damaging it is also both the evidence and admission of a crime as would be the conspiracy to finance and distribute said material. the problem with prosecuting the speech itself w/ cp is that there is simply too great of a grey area when it comes to material and intent and too little actual demonstrable benefit to society at large. as a rule, i tend to believe 'i know it when i see it' is among the worst possible legal arguments to be given institutional credence.

With respect, it feels to me like you're sidestepping the issue because it's more satisfying if the law has clean lines. What about incitement to murder? If Trump said something like "I think people should take their assault wepaons to Washington DC and kill Joe Biden." Incitement to murder in this case is speech, but it's criminal speech, ergo speech cannot be entirely free. Effectively what I'm saying is that I don't think it's possible to be as cut-and-dry as you'd like it to be.

>forced to censor him Really!? Who was holding the gun to their head.

It was probably advisable to censor his tweets if Twitter didn't want their more easily angered users to turn against them, but they were by no means compelled to do anything.

We differ on semantics. I didn't mean they were forced to by anyone outside Twitter, more that a threshold has been crossed here which they really couldn't ignore or sidestep by placing an "advisory notice" next to a tweet.

Hmm, fair point. I think "forced" is very loaded in this situation, however.

'As your President, I call for all my loyal followers to make an example of branon, if you know what I mean.'

Do you think people should be able to yell "Fire!" in a crowded room?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the... was a metaphor for writing to oppose the draft during World War I. It was a bad decision that has been partly overturned.

Honestly, yes. What if there was a fire?

I understand that you intend that to read as "do you think people should be allowed to yell 'fire!' in a crowded room in which there is no fire", but for every false positive punished you create a chance for a false negative to arise from people to afraid to speak up for fear of getting it wrong.

I'd like to see some evidence for that assertion.

My evidence is mainly from an infosec perspective: you aren't going to get your front desk to report suspicious activity if they have no incentive, or if they feel like they are fobbed off every time they try to report a potential issue. Every report of a problem, no matter how big or small, should at least be taken seriously enough to record the report and investigate its credibility - otherwise you'll set up a culture of issues going unreported because they get poo-pooed when they are reported. I'll see if I can find the talk where this concept was first put in such plain words to me, but I believe it was a Defcon talk called "Steal Everything, Kill Everyone, Cause Total Financial Ruin".

That's not evidence, that's a hypothesis. Do you have evidence that fact-based reporting standards produces more false negatives than positives?

To add to the sibling comments, Christopher Hitchens literally yelled "Fire" in a crowded room [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY

Reply on news.ycombinator.com