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Comment by wrsh07 | Hacker News Reader

Calling it free speech when an authoritarian government heavily restricts what can legally be said feels a bit disingenuous

Do you know anything about poland's heavy restrictions on speech?? https://notesfrompoland.com/2018/08/21/polands-insult-laws-a...

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As an individual, when your speech is banned, it's all the same whether it's by an authoritarian government or by private companies.

Are we playing semantics here? You called it "free speech". I wish we all had the 1st Amendment in Europe, but unfortunately we don't. Every European country claims it has free speech, but at the same time puts limits on it, let that be anti-communism laws, hate speech laws, laws against offending religious people, or whatever really. That's just how things are in Europe, sorry. Whatever the Polish government might have done to that point, they have my applause for trying for once to actually expand the freedom of speech on the internet. And even Merkel seems to agree with them and I don't really like or trust her either.

Thanks, I was not on the same page as you, but I take your points.

I'm very skeptical of this approach, but I don't think I have anything else to add to this thread

Look, all I'm gonna say is that the social media are not a free speech refuge. You still can't say anything that your government made illegal. Just as the article you posted says, Jaś Kapela was put on trial for something he said on the internet. So I really can't see how this could backfire at people in any way, as it can only expand the freedom. Unless you believe that you can trust private corporations with censoring what they deem as harmful of course, and in that case I would just like to remind you that Google supplies the Chinese government with surveillance technology and companies like Apple and many others benefit from the slave labor.

I definitely think we need a better solution for moderating social media

I don't think the answer is "everything that's legal"

Laws aren't light enough weight to make some determinations. Eg I think it's reasonable to ban posts that incite violence after people literally storm a government building, and I don't expect most (non authoritarian) governments will react quickly enough to do anything meaningful.

However, we need better, more transparent systems (especially in the US) of deciding what should or shouldn't be allowed

(Note: I actually think that changing algorithms to make it so that people aren't encouraged to see conspiracy theories is much better than censoring them outright. And so I think there is interesting space for innovation there.)

I fully agree, though, that it's incredibly concerning to have 3 (or fewer) unelected people deciding what shouldn't be read or seen

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