Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

Couple this news with this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26804977 . We need not only decentralization and "openness". We need independence. People should be held accountable by lies and defamation they eventually spread but the possibility of publishing information or "personal media" should not be arbitrarily controlled by any government, company or market.

Edit: replaced "Punishment for crimes like hate speech should be enforced" by "People should be held accountable by lies and defamation they eventually spread"

View on HN

Punishment for crimes like hate speech should be enforced

Can I assume you're not in America? In the USA, "hate speech" is not, and cannot be, a crime. The 1st Amendment forbids content-based limitations on speech.

The US Supreme Court has ruled in favour of restrictions on free speech before; the First Amendment is not absolute. It is not unthinkable that with changing society and changing judicial review, the USA too may one day find hate speech to be a crime.

Hate speech being a crime is not the problem. The power of the arbiter of what defines hate speech is.

It's also unclear to me why that, in turn, is a problem. There are several fuzzy areas in American free speech law as it stands, and arguably most people are already happy to allow (and encourage) regulation in other important areas of life, from medical/food regulation to warranty regulations, to electrical safety regulations, to frequency band regulations. The 'power of the arbiter' there is almost never brought up as a problem, despite the fact that this immense power can have very real consequences.

If a democratically-elected government can be trusted (by the populace who influence the laws) to regulate what you can sell and what you can transmit in the airwaves, to regulate the minimum amount you can pay people, to regulate the age at which someone can be employed, etc. - why shouldn't the same government, subject to the same safeguards against misregulation, also have the ability to regulate this portion of speech too?

This is more of a devil's advocate argument than anything, but I'm interested in your thoughts.

So you're saying that because we've already given the government too much power in areas that it was never meant to be involved we should just keep going?

In China, "hate speech" includes anything that is critical of the government. I'm very happy that the U.S. has a very high bar for free speech, otherwise we would have been in a very bad spot all throughout the previous presidential administration.

Yes. In india criticizing the government lands you in soup for "destroying the social fabric of the country" and "against the interests of the nation".

Smh

A death threat against a whole ethnicity is illegal and in no way considered protected speech, and same goes for libel and threats to individuals.

And this is by design.

A death threat against a whole ethnicity is illegal and in no way considered protected speech

No, in America this is false. A true threat must be a credible, present danger to its target. Saying "all people of race X should be killed" is nothing like that.

same goes for libel and threats to individuals.

No. Libel is not illegal, and is still protected against prior restraint. It's only addressable through civil liability suits.

And this is by design.

Yes, I'm not in the US. But I think I didn't express myself clearly. Actually, what I mean is more something along the lines: "people should be held accountable by what they spread". Things like defamation are punishable in the US, right?

No, not under criminal law. It requires a civil suit.

Also, in the USA, truth is an absolute defense to a defamation claim. The burden of proof is on the plaintiff to prove that the speaker was wrong, and further, in most cases, that the speaker should have known that it was wrong.

People like to talk about "defamation", but in America the bar is so high that it's only rarely applicable.

> Punishment for crimes like hate speech should be enforced

> "personal media" should not be arbitrarily controlled

This threw an exception, because "hate speech" is an arbitrary type. It has no objective definition. It is defined by whoever happens to be defining it.

Not that i agree with the GP comment, but isn't that exactly the point of courts?

Eg death threats and all sorts of illegal wording are inaccurate in the literal, programming sense. Humans (courts/etc) interpret and ultimately rule if a set of vague concepts is in violation.

If it wasn't for this capability it would be hilariously easy to avoid almost all repercussion from written/spoken word by just adding a dash of vagueness to the subject. Throw in a pinch of speaking in code and you'll never be charged for any crime, yay!

I loosely agree with you, but lets not pretend that english is even remotely as well defined as a programming language in all cases.

Offloading the problem solving to courts doesn't fix the issue, it just removes your involvement.

I wasn't saying it does, i'm saying _we already have to do that_. Ie, this isn't a new problem. It's a well understood problem, because language is not concrete nor so well defined as to be always explicit.

The activists entrenched in Silicon Valley know better than the peasants or the courts.

Well i use the term courts loosely here, as it is besides my point - my point was simply that humans _already_ interpret word as allowed or not.

We do not allow all english that isn't strictly defined as bad, i thought. I can threaten you in ways that will get me in trouble but are not, by themselves, a threat. English is not that simple.

So my point is merely that it seems to be the precedent is already set for humans to moderate human english. It is not a programming language to be parsed and verified.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com