Hacker News Reader

Comment by mwattsun | Hacker News Reader

Even 4chan is moderated so I think it will be interesting to see how Musk thinks he's solved the moderation problem. I'm confident he would have listened to counsel and not waded into that cesspool without having some sort of new moderation idea that he thinks will work. He says he's a free speech absolutist without ever defining that. He can't rely on the law, because people are free to say all kinds of awful things without breaking the law. 4chan gets away with hate speech every hour of the day.

Edit: This just in, he just defined it and says he will rely on the law.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376

View on HN

> This just in, he just defined it and says he will rely on the law.

Twitter operates in many places with different laws, does it apply the law of the jurisdiction in which the reader is currently located, the law of the jurisdiction of the readers nationality, the law of the jurisdiction the sender is located in when the tweet is sent, the law of the jurisdiction of the senders nationality, the law of the jurisdiction in which the particular server handling a particular API request is located, does it just apply the law of, say the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to all content?

And, once a law is chosen, what is the mechanism of ensuring and providing transparency that all and only those cases where content is prohibited by the identified law are blocked?

(I mean, while some have a problem with what Twitter says it prohibits, IME a lot more people have a problem that what Twitter actually does has no identifiable relationship to it's stated policies, with things clearly not in violation receiving sanctions and things clearly and flagrantly in violation being tolerated.)

>4chan gets away with hate speech every hour of the day.

Just because you hate the speech doens't make it hatespeech.

>He can't rely on the law, because people are free to say all kinds of awful things without breaking the law

When did things change from technocrats advocating for freedom of speech and expersion to being worried about someone tweeting mean words?

Growing up I always heard: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.". Now I hear about deplatforming anything and everything that doesn't support status quo.

In general, I agree with you, but I'm referring to speech in the context of a social network. 4chan is a niche community because it is too rough for most people. Unless Musk wants to turn Twitter into 4chan, he's going to have to get real about moderation and like I said, even 4chan is moderated.

>even 4chan is moderated.

I really don't think this is as good of an argument as you think it is. Yes, 4chan is moderated to remove illegal content. Then of course there are topic boards and SFW boards which are moderated to keep off-topic and NSFW threads at bay, but then there is always /b/ where everything goes.

I highly doubt Elon actually follows through with his "all legal speech is permissible" plan. Even in that tweet he's not completely unequivocal. He didn't say he's against censorship that goes beyond the law. He said he's against censorship that goes far beyond the law.

It is not practical or desirable to rely on the government to set the bounds for speech on giant social media platforms.

Which law? How is jurisdiction determined? Are there places where merely witnessing certain content is illegal for them but legal for the person posting it? Is a proxy or VPN sufficient to avoid that as a user? Is it going to just be U.S. federal law, California law, U.N. treaties and policies, or what?

US Federal laws and CA law will be the same, 1st amendment trumps anything CA would try to do to curb speech.

Same with UN Treaties, it literally not possible for the US to enter into a treaty that violates the constitution, the US Constitution overrules all laws, treaties, agreements, state laws, everything.

> US Federal laws and CA law will be the same

No, they won't.

> 1st amendment trumps anything CA would try to do to curb speech.

Technically, no, the 1st Amendment as such, has no effect on California. The Supreme Court has, however, found that the among the restrictions imposed on the Statss by the 14th Amendment are protections essentially precisely equivalent to those in several parts of the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment.

But that doesn’t make California and federal law identical, it makes the outer limit of what federal and state governments could prohibit generally similar (because of the different interests of federal and state government and the way the strict scrutiny test is applied, even the actual outer limits on the two are not identical.)

>Technically, no,

hmmm

>>The Supreme Court has, however, found that the among the restrictions imposed on the Statss by the 14th Amendment

So then, technically, yes it does apply.

>But that doesn’t make California and federal law identical,

Exactly, CA can only allow MORE speech, it CAN NOT have a more restrictive speech law than is allowed by the 1st amendment, which is pretty expansive prohibiting only actual defamation and true threats.

> So then, technically, yes it does apply.

Technically, the First Amendment doesn't, the due process clause of the 14th does.

Practically, the effects are indistinguishable, since the Supreme Court has found that 14th’s due process clause protects rights essential to ordered liberty, and the Supreme Court has found that those rights essential to ordered liberty include (but are not limited to) rights coincidentally identical to the entirety of those protected against federal encroachment by Amendments in the Bill of Rights whose numbers are integer powers of 2 (though to my knowledge no actual case has used that particular description), plus subsets of those protected against federal encroachment by the 5th and 6th amendments.

> Exactly, CA can only allow MORE speech

California can, and does, restrict content in ways which the federal government does not. It can't allow less than the First/Fourteenth Amendment freedom of speech mandates, but the federal government doesn't prohibit everything that could be prohibited under those restrictions, and a rule that only prohibited illegal conduct would apply differently if it applied California law (or law applicable in California, including federal law) than if it applied only federal law, and differently if it applied the combination of federal and California law than if it applied the combination of federal law and the law of some other state.

You are just being intentionally obtuse, and not really providing anything of substance this conversation. I would like you to cite an example of your claim where CA "can, and does, restrict content in ways which the federal government does not"

> I would like you to cite an example of your claim where CA "can, and does, restrict content in ways which the federal government does not"

A few illustrative areas:

1. Violations of the California Right of Publicity (Civil Code § 3344).

2. Libel (Civil Code §§ 45, 45a.)

3. Violations of California obscenity law (Penal Code § 311 et seq.).

All three of these are laws that have been found enforceable and outside of First Amendment protection, but which impose civil or criminal liability for content which is not (inherently, though there may be some overlap) unlawful to create/distribute under federal law.

The first is pretty special to California, the other two are things which are generally viewed as “illegal in the US” in broad outline, but which mostly are a matter of state law, not federal law, with different precise statutory boundaries (and even more differences due to case law) in each state which has a similar prohibition.

ppl complain about twitter being bad..4chan is just way more moderation, awful captcha system, new posts always being hidden at the bottom, etc.

4chan gets me out of my bubble. It always surprises me how some people look at the world, kind of like how Terry Davis and his Temple OS was interesting.

With 4chan, if you are willing to actually engage, you can have some of THE best discussions on any platform out there.

As a wise man said, on 4chan smart people pretend to be stupid. On Reddit, stupid people pretend to be smart.

That's a very unspecific comment. Twitter could censor just about anything they want and be on the right side of the law lol.

At the end of this experiment, either Musk will be cancelled or the cancel culture will be gone.

And? Free speech means they can say whatever, if you don't like them you can unfollow?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com