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Comment by zxzax | Hacker News Reader

So what is the solution there? Should twitter and facebook have their own internal legal system, decided upon by democratic vote as I was just describing? What would make it inherently less tribal if they did that? Would that stop large groups of people from all deciding to vote as a block and criticize one person all at once? Or is the goal something else? Surely, if this problem were theoretically solvable by a social media site, there should be some different way to operate one?

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The legal system goes to great lengths to prevent it being everyone just voting who is guilty.

Democracy is not for individual cases. Jury selection throws out 95% of people because there are so many biases that make democracy terrible for this kind of analysis.

So to allow any post through, twitter should have a process that randomly selects an unbiased jury of other twitter posters, and have them judge the post before it becomes public? And that process will be administered by democratically elected representatives who ultimately decide on the 5% that doesn't get thrown out? What if you are a person who just happens to hold strong preconceived opinions about a lot of things, wouldn't you be seen as "too biased" for any jury, and get totally excluded from this process? Would that be the system being fair, or would it be another example of "cancel culture" stopping people from being jurors? I don't know, I'm just spitballing here, I'm not a legal expert or anything, but I do know that jury stacking/tampering is a real thing that happens.

I’m not sure what your point even is. Twitter should just not allow people to claim other people raped/robbed/etc without pointing to some actual conviction or ongoing trial.

No letting a pool of people decide guilt based on literally no evidence. That’s insane.

- Social media should not allow the broadcasting of unproven allegations that individuals have committed crimes, just as conventional media is barred from doing so until the cases have been heard in court.

- Utility-like services should not be allowed to refuse service to individuals without clear reason.

#1 seems practically impossible to do, considering that the definition of what a crime is tends to vary between jurisdictions. It may work if on a closed internet and social media that is segregated by jurisdiction.

#2 is already true in some cases, but as usual, the real answer is something like "it depends."

> #1 seems practically impossible to do, considering that the definition of what a crime is tends to vary between jurisdictions.

Alleging that someone has done something that happens to be a crime aren't a problem, the problem is wilfully alleging crimes outside the court system. The overwhelming majority of the posts that cause these problems either explicitly claim that someone has committed a crime, or explicitly claim that someone has committed an act that is well known to be a crime.

> #2 is already true in some cases

Not really in the US AFAICS? Certain narrowly defined groups are protected against being denied service by private businesses, but there's no broad general protection.

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