Comment by hans1729 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hans1729 | Hacker News Reader

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While I completely get the sentiment: I missed these complaints when platforms didn't grant ISIS free reign to spread their propaganda. Dealing in absolutes doesn't do the nuanced systems governing our reality justice, you should know that.

To illustrate: absolutely free speech would imply the right to harmfully agitate kids for whatever your cause is. Does it seem obvious that this is a bad idea? Then just extrapolate "kids are easy to manipulate" to "adults are mostly just older kids".

And btw, I know what it's like to be on the other side. That doesn't justify turning a blind eye to the madness that comes with absolute free speech.

Either you accept that a line has to be drawn somewhere, or you accept every consequence of absolute free speech. Which, imo, would be a terrible idea with 7 billion people just waiting to be gamed through their fears.

Don't get me wrong, I don't consider what we're seeing here unproblematic at all. I just don't consider absolute free speech to be unproblematic either, quite the opposite.

Actually they did. People were using facebook groups to post ISIS decapitations and recruit people. I even reported a few of these groups myself. Facebook never shut them down.

Remember those cases were Facebook was promoted to use violence and persecutions against religious minorities across the globe? And then after the investigations, Facebook just brushed it off as "oh, that, sorry we didn't know"?

Reddit was full on anti china rage exactly a year ago, so much so, that the moderators of the covid subgroups themselves started moderating it in a way that allowed for some objectivity one of the covid groups.

I guess the difference here is that Facebook, Twitter and Reddit who have been prospering with this poison are now at a point where they can no longer play the ignorance card, which is why they banned a certain individual.

The main contrast is that Parler's rhetoric is that they'll take all the discards from the other platforms.

I haven’t considered this. Thank you for your perspective.

Twitter and Facebook have both been banning a lot of ISIS-related accounts. https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/ku6jdx/amazon_to_drop...

On FB, ISIS groups that I was a member of years ago were deleted. Don't interpret that as me being or wanting to become a member of ISIS. I simply wanted to see what propaganda they were spreading, and measure for myself how it compared to the MSM portrayal of such.

I don't support "absolutely" free speech either. A line has to be drawn. I think it should be drawn as narrow as possible.

If someone promotes a campaign to hunt down an individual and murder him/her; certainly I wouldn't blame anyone for taking that content down. I think we already have a good tool for where the line goes and that is the law. E.g. you can't recruit and plan for terrorism and you can't spread child pornography among other horrible things.

This is something else. This is a situation where three major companies use vague paragraphs in their terms and conditions to target a specific platform.

What's next? If Parler self-hosts, will demands come to ISPs to shut them down? Where does it end.

> I missed these complaints when platforms didn't grant ISIS free reign to spread their propaganda.

They existed, it's just that it takes a lot of courage to speak out against deplatforming ISIS, so most people just stay silent in public. I was fairly outspoken about defending their right to expression, but that was only to "safe" groups of friends rather than the general public. (Of course, now that ISIS is basically dead I can be a bit more free with my words and admit to disliking them being censored)

Regarding your kids agitating example, as a society we already do plenty of brainwashing of kids, it's why our ideas of right and wrong are so different from 200 years back.

Also, we had near absolute free speech on most of the internet for most of the 2000s, so your fearmongering there rings hollow.

The internet from the 2000s is not what the internet is now, and I cannot see any "fearmongering" (a loaded word these days) in the previous comment.

Your reply is not addressing the main point: that P believes there ought to be limits to free speech (imo also a completely obvious conclusion). P provides simple "Ad absurdum" examples for why that is. In you stating that kids are "brainwashed" elsewhere too is just engaging in whataboutism.

Can you explain why you think there is sufficient additional value in completely---absurdly so---free speech (as per P's scenarios, for example) over limiting obviously dangerous and detrimental speech? Obviously the crux lies in drawing the required boundary, which is the job of an educated society as a whole and might be in flux with the times.

> Can you explain why you think there is sufficient additional value in completely---absurdly so---free speech (as per P's scenarios, for example) over limiting obviously dangerous and detrimental speech?

Not simply, no.

It's a very long (book sized) argument that I've been gradually making bits and pieces of over the years. I really wish I'd kept the little bits I'd type out in one forum or another so I could just point at that...

Though, for a fragment and possible intuition pump: the censoring is putting the cart before the horse. You need to determine whether something is dangerous or detrimental before banning it, but the act of censoring it or neighbouring ideas or the kind of people who espouse it prevents that very determination that ensures you aren't censoring true things. You also get all sorts of other effects like purity spirals and fights over which group gets to decide what is censored and groups then doing things even they admit is wrong in order to keep control of the censors ("it's worth a little lie to stop the nazis taking control").

EDIT: You're correct that the comment about kids isn't a full argument, it's an argument fragment that needs various other things to be held and explained in order to be complete. But there's no point in spending ages outlining it all unless I'm going to do so in a less transient medium like a blog post. So instead I post the fragment hoping it's the one piece the reader was missing for things to click.

The ISIS comment is a great analogy. I've been very conflicted with all of this, but you've made a really good point. I guess we did already draw a line. I'm interested to see how that line moves or doesn't in the future now though. I have no idea how things will transpire, so I can only wait and see.

I'm trying to collect a list evidence on the criminal Trump to have something you can quickly point when refuting confused idiot relatives who support him, but I have not been able to follow everything that has been happening for the past few days, for various reasons.

Would you please provide a link to ex-president Trump inciting violence like ISIS? Lesser forms of agitation for violence is fine too.

I didn't equate Trumps actions to ISIS, I tried to illustrate that somewhere, a line needs to be drawn, and that there is apparently an established consensus for this (this being that no one complained about free speech when it wasn't granted to ISIS)

No, I completely understand that, but like I wrote, evidence of any form of inciting violence is enough, I just need something to point to to stop people from falsely claiming that people on the left are lying about their reasons for banning orange Hitler

Ah yes, think about the children.

Oh please, I was illustrating a point. The wide majority of people/"civilians" aren't capable to tell the difference between actual information and propaganda, and since the propaganda is designed to be more appealing, guess which one wins out - the fair player or the one that agitates? This isn't rocket science, you're just turning a blind eye to the consequences as if that helps your case.

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