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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

The underlying problem with this whole idea of banning "seditious lies/libel" is that it's not strategically consistent. If you ban people (especially political leaders!) from complaining that the election was stolen, what happens is that the next election will definitely be stolen, and no one will be able to do anything about it. Then that whole political side throws their support behind some military figure instead of a reality TV star, and that's how the real coup happens and how democracy dies. Game Over.

This stuff has been thought over very thoroughly, a long time ago. It's not nearly as trivial as y'all seem to think it is.

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Even if corporations were to pre-emptively ban all speech that threatens to undermine the public faith in our elections, there is still a legal system which allows for complaints to be heard fairly. For all practical purposes, "How many people can you broadcast your message to" has effectively zero bearing on the strength of your legal case. Therefore, I don't see how banning seditious speech opens up an avenue for someone to actually steal an election.

> what happens is that the next election will definitely be stolen, and no one will be able to do anything about it

People were open to evidence for some time, but none emerged. I expect people would react differently to claims backed with evidence.

I do agree that people react differently based on the strength of evidence, including via careful debate and deliberation. But the law (both actual law and the privatized law of Community Policies by the likes of Twitter) is a far blunter hammer. Attempts to ban "making false and malicious statements" will always come with plenty of collateral damage.

People aren't being banned for saying the election was stolen. People are being banned for saying the election was stolen without any credible evidence to support the claim. There is a very important difference there.

And if there was any evidence, it would been have presented in one of the ~60 lawsuits that universally got shot down by every single court, appeals court, and the Supreme Court. Because they had no evidence.

I might wholly agree with you, but the real question is what happens next time. Perhaps the next claims of a stolen election will also be dismissed by the media and courts as "not credible", censored as "malicious lies" and dangerous "misinformation". How can y'all be so sure that you, or the public at large, will be enabled to tell the difference, when any and all debate about the claim of a stolen election will have been banned at the outset by an overt policy aimed at protecting "the public faith in our democracy"?

We need federally run elections or at least strong enforcement of federal election laws. Every voter that is required to present ID at the polls should be provided an ID or be provided a mail-in ballot. Every citizen should be required by federal law to vote. And some other stuff I am not qualified to post about regarding secure voting systems.

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