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Comment by hwers | Hacker News Reader

I think we're not discussing the real point here which isn't whether "full completely unregulated free speech" should be the norm on twitter or not. Elon isn't proposing allowing CP or whatever the worst stuff you see on 8chan is. The battleground is simply in a much subtler grey area of idea space. Elon basically seems to think there's been push to disallow discussion about quite reasonable subjects (which indeed would have been allowed on HN too, e.g. covid vaccine pros and cons) and he'd like it to be allowed again.

Note also that twitter is quite different from traditional forums in the way it's structured. You follow people, you can block people. The analogy to traditional forums needing moderation isn't really one-to-one.

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Indeed.

The subtle point is that the public forum cannot be owned, and that while the public forum is subject to the law, no one can moderate its content.

What has effectively happened is that the public forum has arisen in the cyberspace. We were not prepared for that since that has never happened.

If the govt hired a contractor to oversee a public good, the contractor could not decide who was allowed in or not, or who was allowed to speak, that wouldn't fly under the law.

Some of the large platforms have (accidentally?) come to own the commons. They cant exercise control just like any other standard property, while the commons are still subject to the law of the land.

Instead of a blanket statement like "my property, my rules" we should be working to define the commons. That is a valid debate. We can debate that definition, which is similar to "what constitutes a monopoly?"

This is the correct perspective imo. Our tech has outpaced our laws. We as a society need to rethink how we operate and move forward with these new technologies without being buried under the wave of change they bring.

Section 230 was our first attempt and it has served us decently. I think it's time for a tune-up with a fresh perspective now that we have a few decades of experience under our belt.

Pretty sure you can discuss cons of vaccinations as long as you don't delve into conspiracy theories / claims without scientific backing.

Edit: But I do recall the COVID origin discussion being quite a censorship trainwreck.

Making claims without scientific backing probably shouldn't be a bannable offence. The spirit of science is about discussion and counter arguments and being open to being wrong or even the idea that the consensus might be invalid, not about coercion.

> spirit of science is about discussion and counter arguments and being open to being wrong or even the idea that the consensus might be invalid

I have seen very few antivax arguments made in the spirit of science. Those that were got repeated lacking the original comment’s nuance.

Keep in mind that the spirit of science was developed with the gates of wealth, literacy and education in mind. Remove those, add in anonymity, or even pseudonymity, and the system veers towards chaos. We are far more open, today, than the Enlightenment-era West was. That requires new tools and guardrails. (What this discussion, broadly, is about.)

Keep in mind, Merriam-Webster changed the definition of 'anti-vax' to include being against vaccine mandates [0]. So if you are against mandatory COVID vaccines for 5 year olds, you are technically an 'antivaxer'.

I don't know how many people have gotten banned over this (though I'd guess nonzero) but it shows just how easy it is to fall under the new draconian speech policies enacted by the majority of social media.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anti-vaxxer

People get banned from yt and twitter for quoting scientific papers that don't align with "the message". In fact it's been yts official policy since mid 2020 to ban anything COVID that doesn't conform to what the WHO is saying.

Thats supposed to be how it works, but in reality the decisions skew much more towards 'that person disagrees with what I personally believe, so ban'

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