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Comment by martin1975 | Hacker News Reader

martin1975

You are being facetious I take it. Twitter started out as free speech forum. We have good definition of what is considered, or rather, NOT considered free speech given by decades of SCOTUS/court jurisprudence. Twitter would be wise to adopt this as a standard for moderation, which permits maximum freedom of speech minus illegal speech. No mora bans on so called "hate speech", or politically dissident speech, only illegal speech. If someone objects to any particular form of speech, use the block or mute button. Also, do not allow anyone under 18 on the platform. That should do it.

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> No mora bans on so called "hate speech", or politically dissident speech, only illegal speech

Twitter is not purely a US forum. In some places the law may say that "hate speech" is illegal, or that politically dissident speech is illegal... what then? Are you presuming that US jurisprudence should be the standard for all of humanity, worldwide?

Twitter is an US company so yes, it should espouse US values. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t operate Twitter in countries that don’t respect the human rights of their citizens, the same as we are supposedly doing in Russia.

Make it US only, watch it die in 3,2,1.

Yes ideally all of humanity worldwide should adopt US standards on free speech. But in the meantime, Twitter and other online services can apply country specific blocks to individual pieces of user generated content.

My country has it and I hope it is ignored. I don't want to subject the rest of the world to such a narrow view of allowed conduct. Prosecution is opportunistic here which simply allows for abuse left and right without much safeguards. It is sold as a safety feature but it is just bad or in the worst case even malicious. Not at all against the US setting the standard here for once.

> We have good definition of what is considered, or rather, NOT considered free speech given by decades of SCOTUS/court jurisprudence.

"We" is only "citizens of the USA". Other countries have quite a different tradition regarding this, and citizens of such countries often quite a different understanding than USA citizens of what is considered as "free speech" in the USA and what does not.

Well Twitter is a company based in the USA so I don't see why the rest of the world's laws should be relevant here.

One thing is laws, the other is "understanding [of free speech]". My comment was about the latter.

Most of the rest of the world doesn't have a codified understanding of free speech. I think the US definition is as good as any.

The linked thread by yishan pretty convincingly argues that this is impossible. Among other reasons, if all legal speech is allowed, Twitter will become overrun with spam and users will flee.

I don't find yishan convincing. Again, that's a content filtration issue, and not one that I think is unsolvable.

> If someone objects to any particular form of speech, use the block or mute button

How do you avoid the problem of thousands of accounts from Russian-funded troll farms pumping out millions of disinformation tweets on everything from vaccine conspiracy theories, Ukraine wars, lies about elections and so on? Do you just accept that Putin gets a free ride to influence public opinion, destabilise the liberal democracies and nudge close elections in his favour?

Muting accounts might be good for my blood pressure (if I can mute thousands of accounts) but it doesn't fix problems like the above or interesting people getting bullied off the platform (it's bad enough already).

> No mora bans on so called "hate speech"

Why is hate speech "so-called" hate speech rather than just hate speech? Do you think Twitter would be a better forum if anyone can e.g. bombard a Black professor with racist abuse when they share some research?

Do you think HN would be better with no moderation?

> or politically dissident speech

This is not banned.

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