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Comment by Goronmon | Hacker News Reader

Where do you draw the line though? Are we never allow to criticize someone for their opinions or "jokes", regardless of content or context?

It's easy to just state "People should be able to make jokes or have a bad day." and while maybe that's true, I don't think we should be able to brush off all behavior by just labeling it a "bad day".

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You draw the line at where it has an actual, measurable impact on other people. “Joe Schmoe has an opinion you don’t like” doesn’t impoverish anyone, it doesn’t prevent anyone from getting food or housing or any other need. It’s just a person having an opinion.

Going into hysterics over trivial nonsense that ultimately doesn’t matter is not helping anyone. It’s not making the world a better place. Quite the opposite.

The early US had many people of the opinion that black people were inferior, more akin to animals than humans. Do you think that led to anyone not getting food or housing, or to anyone living in poverty?

Indeed, and in that time people having the opinion that black people should be free would have been considered to have “wrong” and “dangerous” opinions that would cause great damage to society.

Would we be better off today if those in power then had been able to silence unpopular opinions?

> had been able to silence unpopular opinions?

They definitely could, it just didn't matter because people spoke up anyway.

We are best off when we acknowledge that "opinions" can and do deal deadly harm every day, and not avoiding that point when it is explicitly made.

Today's valid opinion is tomorrow's invalid opinion and vice versa

It is pretty clear which opinions that are accepted by many people today well be unacceptable tomorrow. So why not examine that further? It feels like you're denying your conscience.

Yes, the opinion that we need to demand the firing of people we disagree with does indeed impoverish them.

If enough Joe Schmoes have bad opinions it does in fact impoverish people and prevent them accessing necessary goods like food and housing. Many ideas are in fact wrong and if widespread terribly dangerous.

There are two issues being discussed here: the ability to speak/censor opinions, and the ability to control unspoken opinions.

First, every individual has what should be a rather obvious and fundamental right to think whatever thoughts and have whatever opinions they like. Nobody gets to decide what opinions an individual holds, except for that individual.

Now, as for the spreading of those ideas:

Power to censor is frequently used to silence good ideas and allow bad ones to flourish - see modern-day censorship in China, Russia, North Korea, India, and Australia, or older censorship around the Vietnam War and slave liberation (back when owning slaves was in fashion).

The fact that someone is silencing an opinion has very little to do with whether or not that opinion is actively harmful - and, at the very least, those in power have a strong tendency to use their power (including censorship, if available) to gain more power, and those in the public realm will use their own speech and censorship (including via "canceling" aka mob justice) to benefit their own group, regardless of whether their cause is just or their tactics are fair.

So, it's all well and good for you to say "this opinion is harmful", but that's not really well correlated to whether that opinion is actually harmful. Even when the majority of the country agrees that an opinion is harmful, that doesn't actually mean that it is - but, as a democracy, we choose an imperfect system that works most of the time. That system, however, involves passing laws that declare some speech harmful, based on representatives elected by majority vote of their constituents. Twitter-based outrage from a tiny fraction of the population defining "bad opinions" is so antithetical to the idea of democracy that it shouldn't even be considered in the first place.

tl;dr we have an existing mechanism for controlling "harmful speech" and it's the government, not social media mobs.

I think context, rather than impact is the most important thing.

Private dialogue among friends is just that.

Unless they are actively plotting violence or some kind of action, or making unambiguous bad statements such as 'I hate people of this group' or an admission of a crime, then otherwise, it just shouldn't be news.

Sure we are allowed to criticize someone and if that person has voluntarily posted their content then that person opens themselves up. So much of what happens now is someone filmed without their consent and that video is then posted to social media and the person is doomed. Think of your worst moment and then imagine it was filmed and posted to social media where 100k other people shared it. Very hard to recover from something like that. Imagine for the rest of your life whenever an employer googles your name, the video of that worst moment is the first result. Unless someone is actively doing something that endangers another person, its very rare that the punishment meted out by social media is warranted by the transgression.

it’s unfair that what used to be a passing mistake has turned into the permanent record of your failures. and i think this is much worse for kids than adults

How often does someone, let alone your potential employer, actually know (or care) the name of the person in some embarrassing viral video? It seems like a rare exception for someone to face meaningful blowback from this scenario.

In a post-Donglegate world, I don’t know how interesting this question is. I don’t know exactly where to draw the line, but it seems like we’re so far over it that most people could take “don’t gossip” as a reasonable heuristic.

If you don't know the person, why do you care? Unless it's a politician why do you care? What does it bring to your life to criticize someone on twitter for a bad joke?

Should you care about jokes made by people you have never met in a city far away?

In the real world you would pull your friend aside and criticize him for making these 'jokes'. Now the jokes happen on the internet and instead of criticism from friends, family and neighbors you get attacked by strangers you have never met.

I would say that criticism of opinions or bad jokes is still OK, but given the dynamism of virtual mobs, one should be more careful how it is done. Triggering an avalanche is rarely a good thing, in mountains or on Twitter.

As far as I am concerned, a personal "between four eyes" criticism goes the longest way.

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