Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

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The thesis that it's ok that we simply not give humanity places to speak & share is ghastly. Australia has long had a troubling & distrubing relationship with the press & allowed the wealthy & powerful inordinate legal control over publishing. To apply the same brutal regulation on 98% of human expression & exchange is ignoble. The scope of what you propose to regulate here is so vastly vastly greater.

This application of old, already unreasonable, anti-speech practices to modern telecommunications is derangement.

You notably havent shown any recognition whatsoever of the idea of safe harbor. You've presented only a case for total & complete responsibility, given no outlet or done anything to begin to allow user-content to exist, and are charging these entities with complete responsibility. This is comedically unworkable & a farce, unfit for consideration, in a world when gigabytes cost cents per month & bandwidth is plentiful. These tubes can all just rot & serve only industry & empire if what you propose is allowed.

Only one other country proposes such draconian levels of ultimate responsibity, and that country also funds & pays for hundreds of thousands of censors & moderators operating directly under the state.

The fact that several major governments have come nearly unglued over outright fictions perpetrated across free speech enthusiast platforms suggests unchecked speech isn't an inherent good.

And YouTube doesn't allow free speech. Without regulation, it allows speech as defined as acceptable to YouTube's business. Worse than both regulated speech and free speech is what bad laws like Section 230 ensure: Corporate speech.

This argumemtation is getting darker & weirder quickly. These are publishers... but you dont like that they have rights to not-host content? How is a publisher supposed to do publishing if they also cant tell users they wont host their content? The wbole point of a so called publisher is to exercise their coproate speech rights, which you seem to protest heavily against, & thatcs very confusing to me. That right to pick & discern is the biggest thing 230 does.

As for corproate speech & it's dangers, sites have a right to identity, to shape & grow themselves in ways they think are fit & healthy. That freedom in no way encumbers your right to speech, it doesnt threaten anyone: we all have abundant options for getting our voices out for sharing. We shouldnt all have to listen to whomever wants to yell; free speech doesnt mean every place on the planet must let whomever in to yell as they please. I dont go to a Borders bookstore to get shouted at by religious fringe groups. Bookstores dont have to have copies of books on the shelf, of perhaps these same groups. These defenses are also "corporate speech", the right of Borders Books to maintain their business & shape it. The internet itself rarely cuts anyone off, almost exclusively only under direct legal need, so there's endless options still available; the protest that everywhere, every big site should have to host content seems abominable, uncivil. We have to rely on sites, and a diversity of sites, or perhaps someday more p2p/direct-publish syndication. When a site grow rotten & oppressive, we can & should go vote with our feet, move to other sites.

I agree that unchecked free speech is chaotic & dangerous. Moderation is important, one of the defining characteristics & something we have a lot of diverse different styles & systems for, that we are still learning from. Sites need to be able to host content, without being direct endorsers/directly responsible parties to that content, and they need to be able to say no to content. Without the first, nothing can be shared nor hosted without vast chilling & frighteningly costly & fragile/elaborate safeguards checking each & every word, and eithout the latter all places bece one big room for the very loudest to shout & dominate & control.

Double plus good goodthought, citizen!

It should be possible in any western system of law to defend content containing provably true statements (IANAL!).

>The thesis that it's ok that we simply not give humanity places to speak & share is ghastly.

That goes against today's mainstream ideal of de-platforming people who say provably false (allegedly) things against minorities, women, LGBTQ communities, etc. The logic there is Platform X is a private business and they can kick out anyone they want.

>> The thesis that it's ok that we simply not give humanity places to speak & share is ghastly.

> That goes against today's mainstream ideal of de-platforming people who say provably false

Two things, first, there's a difference between (almost) no one being able to speak online & most everyone except those who social pressures have massively turned against. Even if we did fully kick people off the internet, the scale seems to be less than 1-in-a-million problematic segments of humanity to people who do more or less fine. The main discussion to me isnt the unpallatable ones- it's the 99.999999% case, it's what's generally available before you fuck up & piss society off, brcome too hot to handle. Tbis horseshit about anyone having to host content having to be a publisher is an actual mortal threat to whether humanity (generally) is allowed a voice & to share & express themselves. The minor exceptional case you discuss wouldnt be a case at all without there being an ability to speak, which Australia g the "publishers" brigade of shouters threatens.

Second, I continue to argue even the deplatformed have enormous & vast powers to present themselves online. Their personage may not be welcome on various vast platforms- but if they set up a website, a weblog, or whatnot, usually that content can be shared. Even that is more than these people necessarily ought receieve, is businesses performing services for them for free. Even if the platform blocks your site entirely, you still have a site. People can freely of their own will type in your domain name & go there. They can use other sites to link to you. Communications capabilities are fantastically cheap, just epically low cost, from hardware (purchased or rented) to software (free in many cases). The deplatformed have tried to band together & erect their own platforms time and time again, and no one stops them, no one prevents that. They fail all on their own, have yet to arise to become places of vitality & noteability.

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