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Comment by guscost | Hacker News Reader

Here is my suggestion for Parler’s new moderation plan, which is what at least Apple is demanding:

1. Illegal content is not allowed.

That’s it.

Parler has terms of service that prohibit calls for violence. My guess is that the moderators (I'm one) simply can't keep up with the volume.

If you run a social network and can’t keep up with moderation for calls for violence you shouldn’t be allowed to be in business. This goes for the big tech companies as well.

“It’s hard” is not an excuse.

"The law, in it's equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike from sleeping on park benches"

in the case of illegal content, this usually isn't something that doesn't exist at all one day and then exists in volumes too big to moderate the next.

Chrome allows access to calls to violence.. Google fiber allows access to calls to violence..

Do you really want Google to be the morality police of devices and services you pay for? Because that's sad. It's sad how people adopt authoritarian tendencies because they disagree with people they don't understand.

owner of the content is held responsible

> If you run a social network and can’t keep up with moderation for calls for violence you shouldn’t be allowed to be in business. This goes for the big tech companies as well.

This is such a narrow minded view and doesn't hold up to historical precedent.

Was Facebook banned from app stores when shooters live streamed on their platform?

Was Twitter banned from app stores when calls for violence against Nick Sandmann were spreading?

Was Youtube banned from app stores when it was discovered that child predators were lurking in the comments and exploiting underage children?

So you want AI censorship?

Hundreds of hours of video is uploaded to Youtube every minute, you can't have people to watch it through all. Twitter has thousands of tweets a second.

It's impossible to manually moderate social media platforms by your standard, it's the whole point of Section 230.

You remove disallowed content when it's discovered. Parler deletes illegal parleys when are notified, they deleted parleys from Lin Wood a few days ago.

Real creators could pay, what, a dollar or five to fund the moderation of their youtube videos. Same for facebook etc.

The idea that every social network deserves to exist on terms that are economically preferable to their owners is not some golden rule. These networks didn't even exist 20 years ago.

Yes, I am a big fan of the "it is hard is not an excuse" standard.

I would like it applied to advertisers using tech platforms to evade all sorts of anti-discrimination regulations in housing and employment too!

Exactly. it’s hard for McDonald’s to manage food safety with thousands of locations, but they don’t just go “oh well I can’t be watching everything”. They spend the money making sure everything is fine.

False equivalency. McDonald's can and does manage food safety over a vast area, because they've got it down to a fine art after 60 years.

A brand new startup from last year can hardly be held to the same standard.

The brand new local pizza bar is held to the same standards as McDonald’s. If you can’t afford to do business safely and legally than you can’t afford to do business. Either scale down your plans or come up with a new idea.

Do you think fast food startups aren’t required to comply with FDA, OSHA regs, etc to the same extent as McDonalds? It’s a higher barrier to entry, yes, but not impossible.

This is true. I've previously been downvoted for pointing out that Parler does moderate, but they're a small company so it's a slow process.

Parler is not the "anything goes" website that people like to conflate with Gab.

Yes I think Parler's main problem is growing pains. They're growing literally by millions of users a month and basically they're overwhelmed.

It's so cute that you think the neo-Nazis are on Parler in spite of what Parler is.

Reddit seems to have just as much illegal content. All of this just seems like empty virtue signaling by tech companies way too late to actually change anything.

I don't know much about parler, but Reddit just removed r/donaldtrump and banned the most egregious mod of r/conspiracy. It's also a much bigger site, so there are going to be more people talking on it, but they are at least taking steps to prevent this kind of content.

So you are saying that they should be trying to change the political landscape to prevent things that might happen in the future? Gross.

I'm saying that if it's about illegal content, why make these moves now when there's been illegal content on Parler before today, as well as illegal content that existed on other apps in the past.

There is always a threshold. It isn’t one piece of illegal content that gets something banned outright. So we are just talking about where the line in the sand is drawn.

Thought crime? Grotesque.

Most of the big tech companies have been taken over by activist employees anyways. Look at coinbase. They had to do a purge just to get rid of the employees that weren't working and focusing on non-company issues instead.

Palantir also had to completely leave because there was so much pressure being put on them in the valley.

Does it? How many properly violent subs still exist on Reddit?

Don't forget that they banned ChapoTrapHouse along with The_Donald way back when

Yes and virtue signalling that will only drive a large segment of public opinion highly against them. I'm completely against Trump but doing a mass political purge of everything associated him will only prove a lot of the things his rabid followers say about social media platforms as true. I'm just hoping it won't be followed by employee retribution for holding political views that agreed with the president. We don't need more division in this country.

One consequence of the DMCA is that illegal things are no linger defined in court.

is it about legality though?

It bloody well should be.

Illegal content is allowed even in hacker news.

What does illegal content look like? What jurisdiction? Does Parler need to hire a lawyer to make content decisions?

When Trump says "we need to fight hard!", is that illegal? What if he says, "Go back to the Capitol and start shooting!"? Is that illegal?

FWIW that was our policy at reddit for a long time too. There is a whole lot of nuance to it that is really hard to deal with.

Unbelievable you’re getting downvotes @jedberg, probably one of a handful of people in this conversation with actual hands-on experience.

Thanks. Sometimes people don’t appreciate real world experience. It’s ok, I’ve gotten used to it. I appreciate when others speak up for me.

So do we need a DMCA type thing for courts to file injunctions against illegal content? What is the solution?

The fact is any moderation will be subjective and imperfect. How can making more complicated subjective rules help at all?

It is always subjective, the entity in power get to decide the rule, in this case google is the entity in power. Its not enough to have rule that says 'illegal content not allowed', in the case of play store it has to be 'illegal content (according to google) not allowed'

Surely there must be a way to let the courts determine legality in every single controversial case. It’s just an optimization problem.

We sent fourteen people to walk around on the moon, twelve of them made it, and all of them made it back.

As long as that way, whatever it is, still involve more than one human, you can't avoid the subjectivity problem.

Its not technology problem. Its human problem.

My point is that there is an age-old institution to solve this problem, called a court. We all participate in a social contract where the court's decisions about subjective matters have the force of law.

Where it gets weird is that Twitter also has an explicit user contract with the underlying USA social contract/courts as a dependency! If you could physically live in Twitter apartments, and somehow remain safe from war, why not only depend on the Twitter contract and its moderation system? And that's how we get to the future world of Snow Crash.

I'm downvoting you because you know the answer to those questions. You know exactly what speech is protected by the 1st and what isn't. Parler is not removing illegal speech, therefore their apps are being taken down. It's pretty simple.

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