Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

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> I agree that Parler was deplorable and needed to go, but I keep seeing this "private companies can do whatever they want" argument, and it bothers me.

It bothers me too.

But I'm fine with supporting this temporarily, at least through the inauguration which is likely the highest-risk target.

For the near future, the benefits of disrupting the rioters outweigh any of my other concerns. A month or two of emergency measures isn't a big deal.

When I feel like America is peaceful again, then I'm willing to let my guard down. For now, this clear radicalization needs to stop at any costs.

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Over the long term: it is clear that both the left and the right are moving to break up the big internet companies with regards to antitrust, which is probably a stronger long-term solution to this situation.

These companies never should have gotten this powerful in the first place, but here we are. Might as well take advantage of it while we're dealing with insurrectionists.

> But I'm fine with supporting this temporarily, at least through the inauguration

sounds like 'just a little bit of fascism, it won't even hurt'.

Was it fascism when Wikipedia banned the Church of Scientology from their website?

Or is it recognition that in discussion-based platforms, the only move you have is banning and de-platforming to various extents (from shadow-banning, to individual moderation of comments, to deletion of spam accounts). Literally the only actions you can do as an administrator to moderate discussions is cutting out speech in some way.

That's a tough job to be a mod, for sure, but there is also a thing called free speech which grants even lunatics like the scientologists, freedom of, you know, speech. And it doesn't mean 'free speech you agree with'.

What happens now is that Capitol protest is used as an excuse to exclude half of the country in the conversation before the inauguration (and most likely after), silence their voice, the voice of opposition.

And that doesn't smell kosher to me, to 75M people who voted with me, and thankfully many on the left, the classic liberals.

I don't think it's good for the country to derail to this level of totalitarian censorship, even temporary, no matter what yours or mine political beliefs are.

> That's a tough job to be a mod, for sure, but there is also a thing called free speech which grants even lunatics like the scientologists, freedom of, you know, speech. And it doesn't mean 'free speech you agree with'.

And yet, Wikipedia was allowed to ban them when they started to wreak havoc on the site in 2009. And I don't believe it was very controversial, but my memory may be a bit foggy from the years. (Also, being caught up as part of the Anon-mob at the time probably warps my understanding of the events).

> I don't think it's good for the country to derail to this level of totalitarian censorship, even temporary, no matter what yours or mine political beliefs are.

As far as I'm concerned, this is not much different from Hay's Code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code

Hollywood in the 1930s conspired to censor movies that didn't follow the code. Today, we're seeing that websites that don't follow a code (ie: don't insight violent rhetoric) are open to censorship.

Now I love myself a good pre-code Hollywood flick, and even may find myself oogling at a bit of pornography every now and then. And obviously, the rule against interracial marriage was not very kosher. So I'm certainly happy to be living today rather than in the code-days. But I think you're over-exaggerating for how bad things will be if we go down this path.

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Up till now, we lived in the glorious "pre code" days of the Internet. Alas, as we move forward, we understand the power that this new medium holds. And like Hay's of the 1927, we're realizing that we must hold websites accountable.

You've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that because it destroys what this site is for (intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation).

I'm not going to ban you right now because it's not that long ago that you were using the site as intended (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25362757), but please review the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this going forward.

Just because everywhere else is bursting into flames and descending into the hell realms is no reason to destroy this place. Every community member here should be protecting HN for its intended purpose, and we'll ban as many accounts as we have to to get it back on course.

I'm reading HN for quite some time now and there is no a day go by that I would not see a political post.

I'm not American so I don't really follow facts of your political leaders or your racial/gender problems that your government is trying to address. I consider myself neutral and I would love to see no political posts on HN. They tend to spread into flame wars and as far as I can see bring no real value apart from people venting here..

And I think for that reason you should ban everyone who does politics, either if they hate or love one side or another. Strictly no politics. I love HN for its tech stuff, not political.

Technology is politics. Politics is technology. You can't wholly separate them.

I have read that there was a week or so in 2016 when HN tried banning all political stories, and it was decided that it didn't work.

I humbly don't agree with the statement that technology is politics - it does not make me a better software developer if somebody or somebody else will be a president.

Even though there is an overlap (i.e. taxation, regulations and policies) and we could talk about this since these are the things that impact revenue. But discussion about politics outside of those things that affect us directly is leading to flame wars and unnecessary arguments that bring us nowhere.

Personally I feel even talking about taxes/regulations brings us nowhere as we have no way to influence them.

If you run a social network, you need to decide what posts to allow on your platform. Every platform needs some moderation, lest they be overrun with spam and porn and scams.

If you develop artificial intelligence, you need to determine what applications of the technology are ethical. Is it okay to sell to authoritarian governments? What about the US military? What about individual police departments?

If you develop hardware, or run servers, you need to consider your impact on the planet.

> If you run a social network, you need to decide what posts to allow on your platform. Every platform needs some moderation, lest they be overrun with spam and porn and scams.

Agree, spam/porn/scams are problem on this kind of platforms. But social media is only tiny part of tech in general, and also spam/porn/scams is not really political. And I guess, if in example somebody posted hateful content or content that is bringing damage then this is what our juridical system should handle?

> If you develop artificial intelligence, you need to determine what applications of the technology are ethical. Is it okay to sell to authoritarian governments? What about the US military? What about individual police departments?

Most of the times I - as an engineer - have no say when it comes to those issues - from my experience these are business issues, not technical. And I guess these issues are probably influenced by politics, to some degree.

> If you develop hardware, or run servers, you need to consider your impact on the planet.

I'd say same as above - it's business to decide what to do about those issues. We as engineers think about efficiency - and had been thinking for decades, as far as my experience goes. I was always taught to build things that consume least amount of electricity, things that get from A to B with least effort. And Mr X or Mr Y being a president had no influence at those principles.

You can't outsource your ethics to 'business'. Is it ethical to build UAVs for the military? If you feel the answer is yes, no problem. But if for your the answer is no, but the company you work for is selling just that, then you have a problem - you can try to address it by lobbying your company, by ignoring it, or by quitting. But it is your problem.

I'm not trying to say that you should believe one way or another, I just take issue with the idea that, as an engineer, one should feel no responsibility even in principle for the way the product they create will be used.

I've explained this many times. The answers are laid out repeatedly in comments you can find here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902396.

If anyone truly has a better idea, I'd love to hear it. But first make sure that you've familiarized yourself with the previous explanations and understand the constraints we're subject to. If it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already answered many times why that won't work.

Given that stories with political overlap are inevitably going to appear here, that the site has rules for discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and that the rules don't stop applying just because a topic is politicized, if users break the rules repeatedly and ignore our requests to stop, we ban them. What else would we do?

Don’t allow ideological posts then alltogether, otherwise you can only expect flame wars, endless flagging, and more work for you.

I’d be happy not to see politics on HN, but I’m not going to remain quiet when I see one-sided political argument here just like on Reddit.

That's not the way this site works. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25723581 for more explanation, and links to tons more explanation.

The way this site works is that you (not you personally, but all of us) need to follow the rules regardless of what other people are doing. Right now you're flagrantly breaking them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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