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Comment by CGamesPlay | Hacker News Reader

Surely there's some space between "Recommend" and "Ban"?

Everytime this is coming up, I wonder why people were always okay with banning nudity but now that hate speech (that undeniably agitates people and leads to hate crime) gets banned, they oppose content blocking.

Who was okay with banning nudity?

I think the only thing I've seen universally agreed upon to be bad is child pornography.

Nudity is banned on television, youtube, facebook, twitch, and any public place in the US. None of those had significant outcry when it was banned, and people bat an eye so little at that status quo that I apparently had to write this comment to remind you.

Whenever nudity is banned I remember there being an outcry. I also think banning nudity is dumb, so maybe it's just an issue of confirmation bias.

Please feel free to point us to the evidence of HN howling with outrage about the chilling consequences of our digital overlords succumbing to activist and advertiser presssure to ban porn (and presumed porn) on their platforms. When Tumblr banned porn, the general reaction was "lol, they're not going to have any audience left" and the one person that raised it as a speech violation (as opposed to a bit of a shame for kinky people) was downvoted to nothingness.[1]

Compare and contrast with how this thread, instead of focusing on "lol, algorithms and context!" has turned into questioning whether the real problem is advertisers signalling they don't want to attach their brand to racist videos (and let's not get started on how angry much of HN was when companies decided to manually enforce policies against hate speech). It's difficult to conclude that most US "free speech" advocates don't believe that banning [perceived] racial hatred is somehow more dangerous to humanity than banning [perceived] adult content (which parallels Supreme Court rulings on what speech does and doesn't deserve protection). Given the respective consequences of racial hatred and pornography, I see this simultaneous presumption in favour of the former and against the latter as very hard to justify.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26218476

It’s a small point, but there’s a ton of full nudity on YT. It just can’t be intentionally pornographic.

IME few creators on youtube are willing to risk their channels by taking any risks in that regard.

For example, I'm told the character creator in 'Cyberpunk 2077' offers adjustable penis size - but many streamers and reviewers won't risk showing it. Even comedy channels that love creating zany characters.

After all, would you trust Youtube to detect whether nudity is pornographic context, when they can't even tell if 'white threatens black' is in a chess context?

I see no ban on Instagram though.

From Instagram's ToU: "You may not post nude, partially nude, or sexually suggestive photos."

And even that isn't universal, depending on what type (e.g. many will be fine with self made 17 year old nudes, far less with forcible rape of a six year old).

The main purpose of free speech is to ensure the ability to criticize the government. It never meant pornography, free speech and obscenity laws always coexisted together in Europe and US. It's easy to construe the criticism of politicians as hate speech, while construing it as nudity would require some higher level of mental gymnastics.

Why should people be allowed to watch anything except what's best for them? /s

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