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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

I think that's alright. They lie, get sued, pay fines. That's why we have regulations for food and drugs.

I don't advocate that speech shouldn't have consequences. I advocate that speech shouldn't be blocked. Twitter, or any platform, shouldn't be doing the police work. They should be indifferent to the speech like a telephone company is indifferent on what people speak on the phone and those who create problems should be dealt with appropriately through relevant channels.

If J&J claims that their talc powder is good for you, their false claim shouldn't be deleted by Twitter. Instead, the appropriate authority should take care of it and victims should collect damages. Their tweet should stay there as a relic.

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Suing and paying fines as a means of preventing abuse of free speech isn't working. Very rich individuals can pay fines without blinking, but the really pernicious one is the lawsuits - a large legal team can make it hell for any smaller actor, can delay and run the case down, can settle privately and completely bury the issue, etc.

I'd rather see us fix our enforcement mechanisms to work better before trying to take off the filters on dangerous and violent free speech.

> I don't advocate that speech shouldn't have consequences.

We already have free speech and consequences. Twitter and Musk have nothing to do with free speech issues.

You want absolute freedom of speech but then you want to limit a company and platform in what it says, which it does by allowing or disallowing certain content? And you would prefer a single person, who has a history of devious activity, having totalitarian control over said company and platform? It doesn’t make sense.

> We already have free speech and consequences

No we don't have it on the Internet. On the internet(including YC), the norm is that your speech is removed and/or you are blocked from further speech (as a consequence) if you say the wrong thing where "wrong" is defined by the platform operators.

Musk may choose to make Twitter an absolute free speech platform but he might choose to make it something else. I hope for the former. He might end up to turn it into something horrible or just leave it as is but I don't know why would you spend $50B to do just that.

Compelling companies to host stuff in its original context in perpetuity even if they want to remove it because it continues to harm people and whilst trying to resolve social media cesspits with more aggressive real world policing and punishments sounds like the worst of both worlds...

I don't know anything about compelling companies but speech by itself cannot harm anybody.

Stuff that Hitler said are benign within the context of knowing what happened in WW2, his words are merely a historic relic and no one start putting Jews in camps just by reading his words. His words are not a spell that makes people do things when you read them. Back then his words caused harm because they were said within the context of 1930s-1940s Europe.

The context doesn't disappear when you block speech. Let the speech exists and enable fair pushback for the opponents of the said speech is the way to handle it, IMHO.

For example, instead of pretending that racists don't exists by deleting their arguments and accounts, let them say the things they have to say and enable the opponents of it have the same reach.

> speech by itself cannot harm anybody

The "by itself" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Sure, if you post someone's home address with an allegation that they're a paedophile, the instruction to attack them doesn't harm them, it's people following the instruction. And the bombardment of words sent to harassment victims isn't the sole factor in the emotional state of harassment victims, and it's the virus that kills not the antivax sentiment etc etc.

But they harm people rather more directly than Twitter having the freedom to delete those words if its management feels that would be the responsible thing to do does...

These things happen only in consequence free environments(deleting a comment or blocking an account is not a the kind of consequence I'm talking about).

That's why I advocate for platforms with structured identity secrecy. Here are some more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025271

if you can sue them, and their right to speech is absolute, then you won’t win.

See the problem here?

No, there's no problem there. Speech freedom being absolute doesn't have anything to do with lying, scamming, giving orders to do illegal things etc.

Think of this having absolute freedom over how you spend your money. There's no direct mechanism preventing you from buying illegal stuff but you can still get in trouble if you buy illegal stuff. This is not a contradiction.

I don’t think you understand what “absolute” means…

> They should be indifferent to the speech like a telephone company is indifferent on what people speak on the phone

So what is your view on content ranking algorithms? Should those be illegal, to ensure that the platform is indeed completely indifferent?

and if you disallow content ranking algos on twitter, then how do you search? Who or what gets to determine what is similar and/or relevant?

I don't have a strong opinion on this. Maybe there should be a button to show you why exactly you get what you get. I definitely don't like the opaque nature of these content curation algos.

> I don't advocate that speech shouldn't have consequences.

By that definition the entire world is an absolute free speech paradise already.

You can say anything you want. Sure you might be canceled, jailed, fined, killed, tortured, or anything else -- depending on what you say, who you say it to and where you say it. But you're absolutely free to say it!

In traditional sense, the free speech is implied to be about your relationship with your government. If you get jailed, fined, killed etc... by your government you obviously don't have free speech.

On the internet platforms, admins can't do any of that but they can effectively silence you(IRL silencing you is very hard).

> They lie, get sued, pay fines.

That sure stopped Purdue from telling everyone Oxycontin isn't addictive.

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