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Comment by psyc | Hacker News Reader

The phrase 'threat to democracy' in this context at this time ought to be a red flag that someone's trying to pull a fast one. Remember when people only wanted to add 'hate speech' to the exception list (things that 'free speech' supposedly 'never meant')? Now it's expanded to hate speech and 'false or misleading information'. And I'm seeing this messaging pretty frequently in a variety of public fora.

Obama is just changing his tune with the wind.

https://youtu.be/mi5da2AhDCY

Where are all the politicians raising the alarm about plutocracy as a threat to democracy? (I know there are a few who do, at least nominally.)

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It's somewhat telling that this event is triggering such panic among the political class. Currently every meaningful social network has more or less the same policies and content moderation. If something is banned on one network (facebook, instagram, twitter, tiktok) it'll almost certainly be banned on the rest. Why not right?

But now that ownership of one network changes hands, it's causing everyone to panic. At least we're dropping the facade about what the political class is really asking for. It's no longer a "private platform, they can do what they want". It's now everyone must follow the same rules mandated down from politicians. Before now the leaders of these networks just happened to enforce the policies the political class wanted. They just have to drag the leaders in front of Congress once in a while to get them back in line. But now that one network is at risk of breaking ranks, everyone panics.

It's a big club. And you ain't in it.

"misinformation" is this eras terrorism scare.

You're starting to see lots of people on Twitter who claim to specialzie in disinformation and monitoring hate speech, it like how all of the Mckinsey types who turned into counter-terrorism consultants around 2004.

Trends in gov contractors, think tanks, and the ex-UN volunteering well connected rich kids are always a good signal of where the slush fund $$$ is going to start flowing. They have a big pull on policy since they have the most to gain.

> it like how all of the Mckinsey types who turned into counter-terrorism consultants around 2004.

If you look at a number of developping political scandals, it seems they turned to pandemic consultants two years ago in at least France, Australia, and a couple others.

> Where are all the politicians raising the alarm about plutocracy as a threat to democracy?

Too busy astroturfing social media in an effort to drum up popular support for their status as plutocrats to comment publicly on the subject, I'd wager.

I don’t think you ever had the right to lie when money was involved. Fraud has always been criminalized, and speech has been restricted to various degrees in many industries: advertising, SEC regulations on public companies officers and shareholders, political campaign contributions, etc.

This is really nothing new.

If anything the first amendment is too idealistic sounding since the US has never lived up to what it implies.

It is a threat to democracy when your opponent has access to social media. But not when your opponent gets removed from social media.

The principles of politicians on full display.

Btw, I don't think moderation is hard. If you are saying Trump is guilty of "hate speech" or whatever, and the Taliban isn't...the problem isn't the rules, it is how you apply them (which is a natural consequence of people at these companies not being interested in moderation at all, Dorsey couldn't contain his glee after he removed Trump...it was a personal choice, not moderation). Social media companies make the same mistake that most people make when they consider politics: they believe things they don't agree with are immoral. It was never the task of social media companies to be the religious police, they just appointed themselves.

> Btw, I don't think moderation is hard.

It probably depends on the user base of the platform, but I believe it could be one of the worst jobs in the world. If you like the community and content, great, but the usual employed moderators on large social media platforms probably need regular therapy to distance themselves from all the crap they have to read every day. There is a huge difference if you have to read it because it is your job and when you do it on your own because you are hungry for something tasteless and when you can just leave a spicy reply.

Outside social media, in the real world Trump is held to higher standards than Talibans because conventional wisdom is that he should be much more level headed given that he went to the best universities in the world and is at the POTUS whereas the Talibans can't even read and control a couple of goats.

People are taking social media rules at face value, whereas they should always ask themselves what would happen to them if they said the same things in a bar.

Would they be kicked out? If you behave online as if you would offline then there are very low odds that you'd be banned.

The report button is the equivalent of people going to the bouncer to have you removed, if he's summoned to remove you it means that you said something wrong or to the wrong demographic.

> the Talibans can't even read and control a couple of goats.

You're talking about the active government of Afghanistan for like...a million years now. Even during US occupation. I think they can control goats.

>Where are all the politicians raising the alarm about plutocracy as a threat to democracy?

Either they're taking fat stacks of cash and keeping quiet about it or they're being subjected to a relentless character assassination campaign that is largely working as intended.

> The phrase 'threat to democracy' in this context at this time ought to be a red flag that someone's trying to pull a fast one.

Why? I mean it's a common rhetorical move for all kinds of reasons and most of them aren't good, so just by pattern matching sure I guess. But also one of the two political parties in the US is openly contemptuous of the institutions of the state and is blatantly attempting to undermine trust in and power of our elections and legislature. You can't really both-sides that one and it's not hyperbolic to describe it as a threat to democracy.

Your last point I mean yes, certainly. But what do you expect from obama here? He's a millionaire monster war criminal like all american presidents always have been, he's not going to ask us to tear down his own house. That one is on us if we want it to be different, no one with any appreciable power under the circumstances has anything close to a reason to change it.

Because we’re about a step away from such 1984-isms as “Free speech advocates hate our values and way of life.”

We already stepped in it. A number of pundits and public figures have been tweeting (I know, ironic) sentences in substance similar to "Free speech advocates are the promoters of white supremacy and white colonialism", also said equivalent to Jan 6th supporters.

Some proeminent ones have even quit Twitter altogether with that as a message.

I know but I'm pointing out that it's not an inherently invalid assessment of the situation. One can hold it in good faith, so what terminology should they use instead?

>> Remember when people only wanted to add 'hate speech' to the exception list (things that 'free speech' supposedly 'never meant')? Now it's expanded to hate speech and 'false or misleading information'.

It depends where you get your definitions from. The European Convention on Human Rights for example only has a couple of 'absolute' rights and free speech is not one. Rights generally need to be balanced against each other (e.g. right to free speech interfering with someone else's right to privacy). Seems sensible. It's a rarity that dealing in absolutes is sensible.

Disinformation (spreading false information that you know is false) is illegal in the US [0]. The question isn’t whether people should be free to knowingly spread false information. The question is who should decide what is false information.

Giving a single billionaire the power to decide what speech is allowed (and what isn’t) is dangerous. No individual’s incentives align with everyone else’s. And the wealthiest person in the world has especially unique incentives.

If we want to align our social media platforms’ rules with what’s best for society, then we need society to decide the rules.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/35

Are you kidding me? Read the second half of those sections. Come back and tell us what the rest of the sentence says.

Condescension aside, fair point - I misread.

Do you think people should be free to knowingly spread false information on media platforms?

IANAL (also judging by what you said you aren't either) But that doesn't look to mean what you say it means [0].

[0] https://www.thefederalcriminalattorneys.com/convey-false-inf...

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