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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this always gets brought up, as if the slippery slope is a natural inevitability. What if it isn’t? What if you can ban actively harmful content without that ban spreading?

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You are right, we need to ban the actively harmful content. Let's start with the stuff you like and want to hear that is problematic. You like cooking content? Well cooking unapproved dishes is associated with obesity. Banned! You like hiking and being outdoors? Well, it disturbs animal habitat and ecosystems. Banned! You oppose and want to speak out about the mandatory microphones and cameras in every room of your house? Well, that clearly interferes with the greater good of catching people trying to commit suicide, avert domestic harm, make sure you are raising your child properly and in accordance with expert approved government requirements, and to make sure you are getting your mandatory amount of exercise of the required energy expenditure every day in order to not be a burden on society ……

But those are all obviously, patently absurd. You’re proving my point. The slippery slope argument immediately descends into hysteria and pretends like people aren’t capable of understanding context.

But no one is saying these contents should be banned. You can publish it, everywhere! Create a hundred sites and post it, feel free! Now, if I don't want it on my site, why can't I take it down? You're saying that if I create a video site for videos of healthy dishes, that I should not be able to take down a video recipe for something that I think is very unhealthy.

> Create a hundred sites and post it, feel free!

When you do that, then they come for your hosting providers and payment processors.

London, circa 1830. Nobody is saying you have to work 70 hours weeks in a cotton factory. You can grow your own cotton, feel free to process it any way you want! As long as the attention market concentrates in the hands of a handful of megacorporations by virtue of economies of scale, the freedom you talk about is not very tangible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_in_Great_Britain_during_t...

I wish I didn't have to work 40 hours a week. Can I just go to some random plot of arable land that isn't cultivated and start farming? Can I just process it any way I want? US, circa 2021.

The old saying, give them an inch and they’ll take a mile seems to hold true if allowed.

The problem is, who decides what actively harmful content is? For anyone in favor of this ban, imagine if Google had an anti-vaccine CEO, and was banning all pro-vaccine content for being "actively harmful" instead.

Then pro-vaccine people everywhere could start using google less and start talking about how Google has harmful/unscientific stances toward content, etc.

And with how big Google is, how effective do you really think that would be?

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