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Comment by ardy42 | Hacker News Reader

> Sounds like some serious mental gymnastics to me. And also not provable with any specific metrics.

It's not really, it just takes the concept of collateral damage into account. Should a billion Grandmas be denied their baby picture fix on account of a moderation team missing a few thousand users' insurrectionist and para-insurrectionist posts? Obviously not, since that action is high on collateral damage.

That said, Facebook obviously needs to do a better job here, and this is one more example of their foot-dragging causing problems.

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Moral of story: FB and Twitter can do whatever they want, because they have more baby pictures. Any new social network has fewer baby pictures, and therefore can be held to a higher standard, to the point that it will be obliterated before it has a real chance to compete.

> Moral of story: FB and Twitter can do whatever they want, because they have more baby pictures. Any new social network has fewer baby pictures, and therefore can be held to a higher standard, to the point that it will be obliterated before it has a real chance to compete.

Eh, not really. You're forgetting the other half of the equation: Parler's niche was the stuff Facebook and Twitter had either banned or discouraged (like false claims of election fraud).

The real moral of the story is: don't try build your social network from Facebook and Twitter's concentrated dross.

That doesn't seem to help your argument: it means that people deplatformed from FB/Twitter should also be deplatformed everywhere else, which doesn't sound like a great policy for freedom of speech or fostering a competitive marketplace.

There was a very real chance that Parler could have attracted a lot of mainstream people. Maybe the 70M people who voted for Trump would have gone there, and started posting baby pictures, which would improve their ratio a lot.

>which doesn't sound like a great policy for freedom of speech or fostering a competitive marketplace.

It's entirely possible and reasonable to argue that the current limits on freedom of speech are insufficiently broad, and that the "competitive marketplace" of ideas has very little going for it empirically.

People deplatformed from facebook and twitter were deplatformed for a good reason. So yes, they should be deplatformed everywhere else.

And this policy works just fine with freedom of speech, seeing as hate speech, threats of violence and insurrection are not covered by the 1st amendment, which doesn't even govern these companies anyway.

> it means that people deplatformed from FB/Twitter should also be deplatformed everywhere else, which doesn't sound like a great policy for freedom of speech or fostering a competitive marketplace.

That's actually a great policy, because FB/Twitter aren't super-eager to ban people for their speech, so the ones they systematically de-platform are usually doing something pretty bad. Note: I'm not saying they always make the right call 100% of the time.

Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Society is not obligated to give bad ideas an audience. In fact, it's doing its job if it filters those ideas out.

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