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Comment by Arnt | Hacker News Reader

The US law laws for free speech, and it has societal norms, too. What norms people expect to apply in the fora they use, most prominently Facebook.

So they haven't updated their laws to match the current society's norms, and the result is that Facebook has to write rules for something approximating all of society. That cannot be simple for Facebook, and I think it's a bit cowardly of the two big parties that neither of them have really tried to bring the law into harmony with current perception of justice and acceptability.

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Is "current perception" really common, or just what the loudest voices demand?

And even if it is common, in my opinion the very idea of free speech is that it may go beyond the commonly held notions of acceptability. It seems kind of pointless otherwise - what's widely accepted already shouldn't really need much protection.

Eg. penalization of blasphemy in theocratic societies surely passes the test of "freedom of speech" if you define it that way.

That question of current perception is IMO a political question, and leaving it to Facebook to answer is what's wrong.

Merkel's done the right thing: She has tried to answer it, and bring the laws into line with what the Germans think currently think is just. (With which I may or may not agree, it doesn't matter, I'm not German.) Her attempt may or may not be a good attempt, but she did try. The Americans talk about the first amendment and turn Facebook into something that looks ever more like a combined lawmaker and court.

I think the difference is that while it may not be entirely practical to replace Twitter or Facebook as the primary means of discourse, it is certainly more practical than replacing the government. Twitter and Facebook imposing their own flavors of information censorship is a lot less dangerous than the government doing it universally.

You're raising a strawman. Replacing government is not necessary, as Merkel proved by example.

Merkel's government was able to propose law changes and have them be voted on by the legislature. Replacing government was not needed.

I think you have this backwards. Once a government establishes censorship there's no going back from it, and nowhere for private citizens to escape it. Private individuals or companies censoring their own platforms is far less serious since, ideally, there are many ways to legally escape it.

Actually what I'm saying is that if the voters want either censorship or after-the-speech rules, then establishing that as part of the political process is much better than establishing it by having the same voters (in their capacity as Facebook's customers and audience) push Facebook to do the job. That it could be evaded is IMO irrelevant if it usually isn't. If people largely follow the law and use the legal process, then the law works.

Which you can see in Germany — people use the legal machinery to regulate speech on Facebook. Publish a swastika on Facebook and people will complain about you to the police (perhaps via Facebook), and the prosecutor will apply the law of the land. That you could evade it is true, that most people trust the law is significant.

You think that the "voters" should decide what is acceptable speech. Just by consensus, "acceptable free speech" can be determined by 60% of the people in the society.

Merkel's government proved nothing. Certainly not that government-mandated censorship is any more altruistic than regular government censorship.

There's a strong fear right now that the EU countries are devolving right back into their old authoritarian ways.

You can't yell fire in a crowded theater... Can you incite a riot, or hatred? What about representing fictions as fact in the news? What are the limits of satire?

The American answers to these questions aren't the same as they are in other nations.

While I don't fully agree with some of my nation's answers to these questions, at least I theoretically have a democratic voice in what those standards and laws are. But some private company in a foreign nation with foreign beliefs is unaccountable from my perspective.

Even if I boycott it, it doesn't mean much so long as my neighbors, friends, and family are using it.

"You can't yell fire in a crowded theater..."

Is it a matter of free speech though?

If you walk into a bank and say "load the bag with money, or I'll blow up the place", do you risk prosecution on the grounds of (abusing) free speech? After all what you did, essentially, was utter some words. (The bomb might never have existed).

What if the government passed a law to the effect of "you can't say the banking system is vile and corrupt because it may encourage people to rob banks"?

It's a slippery slope of sorts, and a line should be drawn, preferably grounded in some logical principle. I don't have a good answer off the top of my head; just food for thought.

Whatever the limits may be... The heart of the problem is that the answer should be derived through the local democratic process. Not imposed on you by foreigners (and that means Americans in the German and French cases).

"Slippery slope" is a logical fallacy.

Not necessarily - it depends on the context and the argument.

If I tell you that smoking leads to cancer, it's also a slippery slope type of argument: after all, having smoked 1, 100 or even a 1,000 cigarettes you'll still be fine, most likely.

> If I tell you that smoking leads to cancer, it's also a slippery slope type of argument

It is not. It is a statement of fact, proven by numerous studies.

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