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Comment by ketzo | Hacker News Reader

I understand, truly, the value of free speech. And I understand that censorship is an incredibly dangerous road.

But yesterday, a mob breached the Capitol attempting to stop the peaceful transition of power. In no small part because of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

The people running these companies, I believe, have a moral responsibility to act.

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Presidents have been literally assassinated long before the Internet. The county when to civil war without electricity. Yellow journalism was the original “fake news” and there was no utopia when everyone “agreed on the facts”.

Let’s not pretend the Internet has enabled something particularly nefarious here.

By pressing these companies to be the arbiters of free speech, you’re exacerbating the problem. These thoughts and people don’t go away, they just move to other platforms.

When people who get censored on all media platforms, ridiculed, ignored, and aren't allowed a day in court to even present their evidence. They're going to feel like the game is rigged.

I don't think it was a good idea to go inside the capital and it will cause very negative and counterproductive blowback.

Media coverage of this will be biased, compare it to the "mostly peaceful" protests happening all summer. It will be used as an excuse to further censorship and sideline sympathizers. The reaction will increase polarization and decrease our ability to communicate.

I'm not saying election fraud happened but I completely understand their frustration.

> ridiculed, ignored, and aren't allowed a day in court to even present their evidence.

..other than the nearly 60 court cases? [1] or the dozens of news outlets that have attempted and failed to find actual evidence? [2] Saying they're not allowed to present their evidence is patently false.

It's not like this is the first time the exact same people made the same claims with no evidence [3].

How long should they be taken seriously for?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=evidence+of+2020+election+fr...

[3] https://apnews.com/article/f5f6a73b2af546ee97816bb35e82c18d

http://www.hereistheevidence.com

I looked through some of what's here. I don't really have the vocabulary to understand if these items are significant or not. Some of them seem like they might be, some of them seem like they're probably not significant, and some seem to point to evidence that claims of fraud are in actuality a farce.

I do have some trust in our institutions and our court system, though. The fact that there has been bi-partisan dismissal across the board of claims of election fraud - even from judges and officials who are on-the-record Trump supporters - leads me to believe that there is little here of substance. Why would Republican Trump supporters who are proud (perhaps to a fault) of defying the mainstream media suddenly fall in line? They didn't fall in line with the other 'fake news' events throughput the presidency, why this one? Imagine the credibility they'd gain if there was actually enough fraud to change the election, and they found it!

I've seen people point to the fact that many of the cases were dismissed by judges without actually hearing the evidence, due to clerical or timing problems. I am incredulous. In order to accept that, I have to believe that a Republican judge who supports Donald Trump and presumably wanted to see him back in the presidency looked at the lawsuit, understood the situation and it's urgency, and shrugged his (or her) shoulders and said 'sorry, you might be right, but I'm not gonna look at it.' I don't buy it.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'm not trying to argue a side here beyond describing things from the perspective of the disaffected, and then what the likely outcome will be.

These people are already suspicious of the legitimacy of the election, denying them the transparency of discovery and a public trial erodes that faith further. Gore got a trial in 2000 with a challenge to the electoral college. The mass of mail in ballots this year represents a dramatic change from the norm and I understand why people want more scrutiny. But really, if half the country doesn't trust the integrity of our election system do we even have a democracy anymore?

It's not that the media should have given credence to the election fraud allegations - they are obviously bullshit. It's that they should have also been just as skeptical and censorious of other allegations without any evidence, such as Russiagate. Dozens of people were accused of colluding with a foreign power, which is crazy, and not just Republicans - Bernie Sanders was accused as well. And the impeachment report by Mueller did not reveal a single piece of direct evidence of any collusion. Even the people convicted during the trial were not convicted of collusion but of other crimes. The problem is that you can't pick and choose what you will censor or control based on political preference. The crazy right wing extremists might be ignorant and on the wrong path but they sense unfairness just like anyone else.

So China is right, there is no other way to maintain social stability other than to control speech.

Or that there's no way to maintain social stability while optimizing other people's speech for maximum engagement and profitability.

its hilarious that chinese state media are on twitter using this to prove how their harshly authoritarian measures are justified

This is what Youtube's actions convey to me. They believe that China is doing the right thing with their censorship actions.

I think we have to bite that bullet. I wouldn't quite characterize it as "China is right" - there's no plausible claim that social stability will be threatened by Winnie the Pooh, he's banned just because Xi Jinping doesn't want to be made fun of. But the vision of a future where anyone can say anything to an arbitrarily large audience is, I think, going to have to be buried.

They believe disrespect for their leader is bad for social stability. Even if it weren't perceived that way, and it was understood as the petty reaction that it is, it's still just an abuse of an existing censorship system. And most items that are censored are seen as important to national stability.

Just like how NSA spying was justified for national security purposes, you see people abusing the system and spying on ex lovers.

The slippery slope argument is not a fallacy.

"The vision of a future where an arbitrarily large number of people can read any book they choose is going to have to be buried."

It's a big sacrifice! I'm not denying that.

er....what? There are tons of Winnie products in China.....

https://www.taobao.com/list/product/%E7%BB%B4%E5%B0%BC%E7%86...

Yes absolutely we should let the powerful people set limits to how much we're allowed to express our thoughts and to whom.

I'm sure there will be no violence since nobody will fight to their death fighting against that, after all it's never happened before let alone for smaller restrictions on people's freedom. Wow, the past, what a good thing it was without the Internet acting as a megaphone, certainly no revolutions nor wars for independence.

The world is analog, not digital, although many on HN forget this probably due to working with computers so much.

There are an infinite number of positions between China-style full control of speech and, say Parler or Voat style "anything goes including things such as calling for killing all the n__g__s and k_k_s and f_g___s".

Most systems that attempt to do useful work require some kind of friction or impedance or damping. I've seen nothing that suggests that information systems are any different.

You are making the same fallacy you are putting forward - assuming that the system is mechanical and just needs tuning with "impedance or damping". This fails to take into account the fact that the people in positions to make decisions on control of speech have vested interests and are even often extremely wealthy sociopaths.

To take that position in good faith you’d have to support the censorship of political movements every time a government building was breached and/or vandalized by their protestors.

https://www.cleveland.com/open/2020/05/state-officials-asses...

if riots are the language of the unheard, maybe it's a bad idea to artificially make large portions of the american electorate unheard.

Honest question: would you say the same if that would be in a different country?

I’d put more of the blame on mainstream media which was basically gaslighting anybody who wanted to rest assured that the election results are accurate.

Calls were made too early too many times over the course of the last couple of months, eroding the trust of the 99% of the completely normal Trump supporters out there.

Even if the Democrats are 100% sure the election is totally squeaky clean there should be no problem to go over it with a fine tooth comb so that everyone can be certain. Instead any attempt at transparency was ridiculed from the beginning with lots of goal post moving to follow about just how much discrepancies there actually were.

Some law changes right before the election also don’t really make sense (like waiving the need to verify signatures and in fact making it impossible to do after the fact by destroying envelopes) and instead if bringing clarity to the situation, mainstream media ridiculed anyone who had doubts about this as being crazy.

The elections were certified. Not just by the media, also by the courts. Many of them, including the supreme court, have heavy republican representation. If there was any credible reason to doubt the results these Republican officials - many of them outspoken Trump supporters - would have considered it. This isn't about wanting people to feel secure about the election, it's about yelling and screaming until they get the results they want.

Yea I know how it played out. I think you may be projecting the viewpoints of crazy trump supporters onto me.

My problem is before it was certified, the media “called” it and ridiculed anyone who doubted them.

It’s totally reasonable for people to want to know why is it that dead people voted, (and more importantly, how many), why strange laws were passed right before the election that made signatures un-important, or why observers were being given a hard time during counting. Instead of being treated as reasonable people, we are lumped in with the crazies who shout that all of this is fraud before there is evidence of it. However, it is equally crazy to shout that “there is no fraud!” before all of this is actually ironed out, and that is where mainstream media failed and destroys any existing trust I had.

I have never watched Fox News. I’ve laughed at stupid NY Post stories my whole life with my likeminded liberal friends. But I am not so blind with rage towards Trump that I can’t see when the media will do anything within their (soft) power to make sure he doesn’t win, even at the cost of their journalistic integrity.

I understand what you're saying, but I don't come to the same conclusion. I don't think that there is any amount of certification or 'fair treatment' that could have come from the press that would have made Trump stand down. Every inch of leniency trump and his most ardent supporters get they take a mile. As long as he's up yelling on his soapbox his people are going to try to find reasons to believe him.

Yes, sometimes dead people 'vote', but that happens in all elections and more importantly happens in both parties, but not enough to swing elections.

I have a pet theory (maybe a conspiracy theory, idk) that the reason the Republican officials have been so quick to shut down fraud claims is because any investigations will find just as much or more fraud on their side.

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