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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Be a free speech platform, how about that?

How about we all admit that this is a simplistic position that flies in the face of centuries of case law trying to work out exactly what "free speech" means and how it squares with people's other fundamental, inalienable rights, because in real life it's not, in fact, obvious?

The boundaries of legal speech are pretty well sorted out.

Web and email hosting companies don't have an issue figuring it out. Twitter shouldn't either.

Simple doesn't mean simplistic.

I'd like a platform that removes illegal speech, nothing else. Such a platform should be legal.

> > centuries of case law trying to work out exactly what "free speech" means and how it squares with people's other fundamental, inalienable rights, because in real life it's not, in fact, obvious?

> platform that removes illegal speech

What constitutes "illegal speech" vs "legal speech"? Clearly, freedom of speech does not give you the right to illegal speech. This is what centuries of case law and legislation have attempted to resolve - what is illegal vs what is not.

EDIT: Heck, all law is like this. I could say "I want murder to be prevented, nothing else" but what if someone kills someone else in self-defence? When is that self-defence?

There are no clear answers.

These platforms exist and aren't hard to find. They also tend to be cesspools.

Part of the value proposition of their competitors is that they do moderate their content, to some extent.

I don't see why we should force all platforms to operate essentially without moderation.

This false dichotomy of authoritarian governance or 'cesspool' keeps coming up.

There exist other options.

Just let the people filter and set their own rules for engagement.

Of course that would eliminate these creepy company's ability to insert ads and other trash into your life, so no one does it.

Facebook had a perfectly fine and working news feed, but then they wanted to insert ads, so they made an 'algorithmic' feed that decides you want to see ads instead. Convenient.

These platforms pretending they can't solve the issues of idiot speech and outright law violations without acting like Stalin is laughable.

Free as in everything that's legal?

Sounds conceptually great to me.

How can such a platform figure out what's legal? Can it default to leaving legally questionable things up? Consulting real lawyer's in every fringe case seems not practical.

Can I call for the death of someone on this platform?

Can you do that on the television, telephone, radio or in a newspaper in America?

I'm trying to find the limits of Freedom of Speech.

Are we agreeing that there are in fact limits on Freedom of Speech?

Yeah, this has actually been thought of before.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terroristic_threat

I'm not suggesting that I've stumbled into some new idea.

I'm trying to understand what people mean when they say "free speech platform".

It seems to be a get out of jail free card of sorts.

"Free speech" without any limits obviously doesn't work. Where are the limits of the parent comment? The devil is in the details.

Twitter, Facebook etc. are communication platforms in the same way the postal service, telephone system, etc are communications platforms.

Communication platforms in the US should adhere to the US constitution.

It can't be that simple. This is a private company.

Isn't this where the entire problem is coming from? If this were a state run service, we know the answer and can apply it easily.

The confusion is coming entirely from it being something other than the state.

Are you suggesting that these international platforms should keep track of location (and nationality?) of everyone who is on them and apply different standards based on that?

Or just on the basis of the one or more places the company itself is are incorporated? Will they shop around for communication laws the same way they do for taxes?

The US constitution effectively says that you have complete editorial control over the content of your own website.

Facebook and Twitter run websites.

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