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Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

"I'm a supporter of Jones being able to spread whatever insane theories"

I think you are a supporter of freedom of speech in general - that's something I thoroughly approve of too.

I also think you are able to understand the difference between seeing a horrendous crime and seeing that crime and attempting to profit from it.

That seems to be what this bloke did: He tried to change and engorge the narrative regarding these horrific murders. This wasn't simply the usual run of the mill "American conspiracy theory".

He tried to convince the world that the crime didn't actually happen and even worse tried to convince the world that the dead were actors and other nonsense. He was caught out rather neatly when his defence team sent rather too much SMS data to the prosecution.

I am a fervent supporter of freedom of speech and other fundamental rights but there have to be boundaries - of reasonable decency and other quite tricky to pin down terms.

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>> He tried to convince the world that the crime didn't actually happen and even worse tried to convince the world that the dead were actors and other nonsense.

I'm a Jewish grandson of Holocaust survivors. I'm also American. I'm pretty happy our country has not adopted laws against holocaust denial in the way Germany or Canada have. I appreciate the thought behind those laws. But I appreciate freedom of speech more. And I do have faith that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that truth will prevail over lies.

On the other hand, but not in contradiction, I'm also a huge fan of the American system of Tort Law. It's the discovery and enforcement mechanism of a free country.

I think in this case, the system is working exactly as intended. No one is jailing Jones for his speech. But he can be held responsible for the damage that resulted from it, in a way that will dissuade others from profiting off of similar attempts to rewrite history.

The opposing, though not necessarily contradictory cliche is of course some variation of “a lie makes it around the world before the truth is out of bed”. That’s the problem, there’s plenty of situations where the lie has done it’s damage long before the truth can achieve much beyond the academic.

I think this is an important point. Many of us here live in cities, but in rural America there is a stunning amount of people who really believe that Joe Biden lost the 2020 election and that there was a massive, coordinated campaign of voter fraud. In many dominantly red states, this is not considered a fringe conspiracy theory but more or less generally accepted as fact.

Not only accepted as fact, but some US states starting to initiate laws around it:

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voti...

It always seemed like that was the intent. Republicans know that restricting voting rights helps them, and Trump moved the needle significantly with his work to do that. His super PAC raised something like $160m post election, so someone may have been paying for him to do all that.

The solution to that is not suppression of the idea(s), in fact attempts to suppress anyone talking about the election only serve as fuel to expand the number of people that believe it, as "what are they trying to hide" becomes of the main part of the story.

Greater, and Actual Transparency combined with a trust worthily network of news outlets would go along way to shut down these types of discussions

Sadly we have neither government nor really judicial transparency in any meaningful way, and we are at a point in time where trust in "news" is lower than trust in congress...

Want to tone down the number of people that believe in conspiracy... More Facts, less Spin...

> Want to tone down the number of people that believe in conspiracy... More Facts, less Spin...

Really? More facts will change their minds? Who will they trust with those facts?

This is bordering on cult-like behavior and it shows no signs of improving -- I'm not optimistic about this at all.

Trust is built over decades, and torn down in minutes.

News outlets (on both sides) have been caught in multiple partisans lies, disinformation, and spin/suppression of inconvenient facts for "their side" for many years now, this has eroded the trust in media and makes presentation of facts harder.

Neither side wants to acknowledge anything that would be seen as supporting the position of the "others"

So in the context of the election, you have one side that refuses to concede that Biden was elected by the people, but you also have the other side refusing to concede that because of COVID and other factors the 2020 election has some pretty non-standard events that (while not impacting the outcome of the presidential election) is the basis of the questioning of the integrity of the election, instead we have people saying the 2020 was the freest, fairest election in all of history because their side won..

neither position is true or healthy, and both position have Cult-Like behavior

Sorry but not buying the "both sides are the same" bit.

> Neither side wants to acknowledge anything that would be seen as supporting the position of the "others"

You seem to be holding up your side of that argument but I don't roll that way. I abhor partisan politics and am happy to point out flaws of the Dem establishment.

As to the last election, it was as fair as one can hope for -- you're taking the defense of the legitimacy of the election to cult-like behavior? What exactly is the left doing that's cult like in that regard?

And thanks for the lecture on the veracity of news -- gosh I had no idea that people like William Randolph Hearst ever existed and manipulated the media generations ago.

Maybe too hard for you, but nuance is a thing -- any source of information is going to have bias and imperfection and it's a matter of understanding that bias and taking nuggets of knowledge. Case in point: while the NYT has made many egregious mistakes (supporting the Iraq war being a biggie), I still trust them as a news source more than Fox.

Fox news was designed as a propaganda wing of the GOP. This is documented. And yet all of you on the right happily lap it up and dismiss any source that doesn't satisfy your preconceived biases.

And as far as COVID goes -- prior to the past president viruses were not political. Bush was at least pro-science in that regard.

>>it was as fair as one can hope for -

I dont think when you have governors of various states in real time changing election rules, and regulations under "emergency" powers can be considered "fair it one can hope"

Also contrary to to democrat talking points there have been successful legal challenges to those election regulation modifications done by governors or election boards.

2020 election was unusual for a variety of reasons not just COVID, and it should not be controversial to say we need to look at all of the changes, emergency orders, and other activities that were happening to ensure everything was handled correct, something I don't think many on "the left" want to even acknowledge

>>while the NYT has made many egregious mistakes (supporting the Iraq war being a biggie), I still trust them as a news source more than Fox

Most likely because your personal bias leans in the same direction as NYT, so you are looking for confirmation of your worldview which NYT, most of the time, provides you.

>>And yet all of you on the right happily lap it up

I am not on the right, nor do I watch fox news ( or CNN or MSNBC or NYT), I get most of my news from varied sources (my RSS feed is currently following over 250 feeds) i also love the GroundNews App / Website.

Ideologically I am a homeless nomad, and reject all political parties, I would love a system where political parties are completely banned. Individualism is my preferred state

>And as far as COVID goes -- prior to the past president viruses were not political. Bush was at least pro-science in that regard.

and you believe only the right has politicized covid? Interesting

> I dont think when you have governors of various states in real time changing election rules, and regulations under "emergency" powers can be considered "fair it one can hope"

Which changes that were made as we tried to navigate a presidential year election during a pandemic do you believe made the election unfair? Why did the vast majority of the complaining about these changes come after the election rather than as they were being made?

All of them, and there were lots of complaints while it was happening.

I dont believe governors have, or should have, the power to change election law at all, for any reason even "during a pandemic"

I also dont believe governors should have most of their so called "emergency powers" that is ripe for abuse, and many governors did just that, and continue to do just that even outside the election context

There's been dozens of lawsuits and no smoking gun. We had a pandemic going on and so mail in/drop of ballots were promoted.

Show some evidence for this concern or just drop it. Ironically, election security is in peril because the GOP is installing officials that are ready to steal the next election.

I don't treat the NYT as gospel; it's yet another input for consideration. I'm painfully aware of confirmation bias and do my utmost to take whatever truth becomes apparent.

"Political" has varied meanings/interpretations. In the context of laws and regulations vs. partisan power mongering.

Dealing with a pandemic required unfortunate actions which are political in the first sense. The anti-vax movement has been embraced by the GOP and it is very much political in sense of identity.

I do agree with you on the corruptive nature of political parties.

Long and short of it: I "lean left" but don't make my identity about that. There are classic elements of old school conservatism that I agree with but modern conservatism has now been coopted by the Evangelicals and they are bat shit crazy. Goldwater was prescient and correct in his concern about that happening.

Cult-like behaviour seems quite the norm across the USA though. Cheering for politics as if it was a sport, everything needs to be an spectacle, lack of pragmatism and an obtuse clinging to absolutist, dogmatic thinking (as you can see from any discussion around freedom of speech).

It's rather bizarre that instead of seeing this cult-like behaviour (in the news, in politics, etc.) as an emergent property from the general American culture most will blame the news and the politicians for creating it. It's the inverse, they are just feeding what the populace actually is and behaves like.

> More Facts, less Spin

What the United States needs to target is the economics of news. Actual news. Not infotainment.

Don't attempt to regulate good/bad news: economically incentivize good reporting and disincentivize bad reporting. The market will follow.

If 24/7 news channels weren't profitable... there wouldn't be any 24/7 news channels.

Well as we have seen in this Alex Jones case, and other recent defamation cases it seems both the public and the legal system are turning from "defamation is almost impossible to win" to something else

the Economics of news is going to be very different is media can not hide by "anonymous sources" and "it is just opinion" while spreading lies about individuals or events.

I think the next cases may find more well known news outlets in the defendants chair of defamation action

and it's still more important to have free speech because who decides "truth" and "lie"... and what happens when those in power switch and the other side decides.

Want Biden or Obama to have some power? Are you going to be okay with Bush or Trump gets that power?

I don’t think I suggested granting a particular power to the president. I just engaged in a discussion on the nature of truth and lies.

I would suggest that you at least try to put yourself in the position of these parents when thinking about this topic (as impossible as that may be). Imagine having your child murdered then having this waste of life make up vicious lies about you and your dead child.

Political parties and Presidents don't decide what truth is and what lies are in the United States, or other free countries.

Yes they can. They cannot enforce their decisions directly. They can certainly influence, and perhaps even form alliances that propagate those decisions. With those alliances, some decisions can be made into law.

If they can't enforce their decisions, they're not really making decisions. GP was implying that regulating speech meant "truth" and "lies" would depend entirely on which political party happened to be in power at the time. But we already live in a society in which speech is regulated, and that doesn't happen. Trump tried as hard as he could, but every lie he spouted was still pushed against, much to his dismay. He convinced people who already bought into the party line, but no one else was forced into accepting or spreading his point of view.

Freedom of speech still exists where debate, conflict and truth discovery can still occur. Regulating speech mediates free speech, but doesn't have to eliminate it. The marketplace of ideas can accept that some ideas are not worth keeping.

> If they can't enforce their decisions, they're not really making decisions.

Why are you talking?

For that matter, why do we have media, or even schools?

BE AFRAID!!! BE VERY AFRAID!!

It should be noted that this defamation case is not a simple case of denying a reality thus causing trauma to the victims. Jones called out some of these parents by name, put their photos and the photos of their children on his show. Then he did nothing while his audience harassed and threatened these parents for years. Some having to move multiple times and hire private security guards because of Jone's show. He continued defaming these parents on his show even up to the morning of one of the last days of this recent trial saying that the mother was "slow" and being manipulated by the government.

In my opinion, this whole ordeal is pretty close to being deserving of a criminal trial because his speech has incited violence and harassment again and again on these parents.

Meh... I always look back to this case when anyone talks about free speech. It's a tough pill to swallow here in the US. I would be more than angry, and emotionally scarred, if anyone picketed near a family member's funeral.

https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-a...

They might jail him for perjury though...

i hope you're correct, but i suspect that swiss bank accounts, shell corporations, clever accountants and "gifting" money to friends and family will say otherwise.

Those Swiss bankers are equally indiscriminate. They allowed a minority of wealthy refugees to hide value and allowed Nazism to hide expropriated goods and money, stolen from those self same wealthy refugee's less savvy compatriots, and continue to hide this wealth alongside the more quotidian tax avoiders and druglords and arms dealers.

What I find fascinating is that even after panama papers the banking system is reluctant to really tackle the problem. We learn more from whistle-blower and (possibly law breaching) seizure of strong boxes, than we do from Swiss banks voluntarily. They really only love money. Social justice is nothing.

Swiss neutrality is an enabler of bad things, in finance.

Every time I've had the misfortune to speak with actual Nazis, the first, and commonly the loudest talking point they make in support of their beliefs is that, if what they are saying is fake and is so easily debunkable, why do people feel the need to censor them?

The argument is obviously wrong, for a number of reasons, but I wouldn't mind denying them that talking point.

Why do libel and slander laws exist when someone can just debunk any lies told about them? And then the next lie, and the next one, and so on...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaPgDQkmqqM

> And I do have faith that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that truth will prevail over lies.

I wish I had that faith but I think the Holocaust stands as a pretty big counter-argument. I'm genuinely curious about your faith, do you think that something could have been done in Germany in the 30s which would have preserved free speech and prevented the Holocaust?

Same answer as for the United States: Multi-member national house election by a competent method of single transferable vote (although Meek's method is newer than that, and my Bucklin-based method isn't even fully analyzed yet, so only somewhat-competent methods existed); single-winner elections by a single transferable vote nominating primary followed by a Smith-efficient final election (although the Smith set wasn't defined until later; Condorcet paradox was known, and inventing the Smith set wasn't hard, modern methods which would allow for rapid hand-counting were only invented a couple decades ago though).

Easy problem today, harder problem at the time due to lack of knowledge.

They used a list proportional system (the same system used today in Germany, and similar to that used across Europe). Candidates were controlled by the party, rather than self-nominated. It's a huge oligarchical system that lends itself to enormous perversions of democracy. We have self-nominated candidates in the United States, but party primary elections and every type of election used here (MNTV, SNTV, first past the post, and run-offs) are broken and create extreme distortion, polarization, and disenfranchisement by their mathematical nature.

Democracy only works when it's actually democratic. When it's not, a polarized minority can become dominant over the majority, thus dominating the public discourse and shaping the public reason, retaining and expanding power. Most systems tend to reject whichever represents the view of the voters as a whole body; STV deals with the problems of fair and equal single-winner elections (which suppress minority voices) by proportionality for solid coalitions, capturing the median voter group as well as those minority views leaning away from the median voter in proportion to the size of the groups, which are of roughly-even size, thus introducing diversity into the conversation without lopsided a priori voting power, maximizing the efficiency of the public reason.

The KKK was thoroughly defeated as a power in the US thanks entirely to the US system of freedom of speech; the KKK had a very large, potent base at one time. They were not outlawed as a group, sunlight-as-disinfectant overwhelmingly won out (and no, the US still having a small number of KKK members with next to zero political power isn't a good counter point). It was the ability to tightly regulate and limit speech that assisted the Nazis in coming to power and implementing totalitarianism in Germany.

It's extremely obvious that Trump (his government, his admin) not being able to control the media, control speech, was a really good thing. And that's true whether it's a terrible Republican or terrible Democrat, or any other terrible politician, that is in power. If you give them one big lever of speech control to start from, they'll expand that control, you can count on that.

> The KKK was thoroughly defeated as a power in the US thanks entirely to the US system of freedom of speech; the KKK had a very large, potent base at one time. They were not outlawed as a group, sunlight-as-disinfectant overwhelmingly won out

While the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 didn't, you are correct, outlaw the Klan as a group, it did authorize a whole lot of measures—including authorizing federal military force and suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and new federal civil and criminal causes of action—to combat their actions and those of similar groups, and those authorities were liberally used in suppressing them. Describing the successful strategy as “sunlight as disinfectant” rather than massive application of force is... not grounded in fact.

I know very wealthy people in the south who are giving a lot of money to militias. does that count?

Weimar Germany already had extensive laws regulating and restricting speech. Those same exact laws were turned against the early opponents of the Nazis.

I don’t know if the First Amendment would have stopped the totalitarian takeover of Germany. But it certainly would have made it harder.

"I'm a Jewish grandson of Holocaust survivors. I'm also American."

Fair enough. My Jewish roots (int al) are rather more convoluted than yours.

"I'm pretty happy our country has not adopted laws against holocaust denial in the way Germany or Canada have."

Both of my parents were soldiers and I grew up in West Germany and the UK in the 1970s-1990s (on and off, here and there!)

Tort is to do with contract law.

Be American as much as you can - and I will stand in your corner for that too. However there is some history here and Jones was riffing and profiteering on an event that was nominally genocide and he described it as such.

Please don't mistake free speech for hate and spite.

> Please don't mistake free speech for hate and spite

if you'd put this some other way, I'd be down with it.

However, people who say "hate speech is not free speech" are just plain wrong. Yes, it is.

> He was caught out rather neatly when his defence team sent rather too much SMS data to the prosecution.

Minor nitpick: this was a civil trial so it's just plaintiff vs defendant.

I fervently believe that there's no practical way for government to regulate speech so they shouldn't try. If there were a magic way to stop people like Jones from talking that wouldn't chill free speech in general, I'd take it in a heartbeat. He's not contributing to the marketplace of ideas. He's spreading lies deliberately for his personal profit.

There are plenty of very practical ways to legislate speech, we already do it all over the place.

We don't live in this legal abyss, most institutions make decisions for their business, but also for what they view to be higher, civic purposes.

Cable and Broadcast TV standards aren't just about profit maximization, they're kind of there to set a 'decency precedent'.

I mean, for the same reason you don't see 'porn everywhere' - you don't see the kinds of hyperbolic stuff Jones is saying all over the place.

Almost all organization have thresholds of various kinds, certainly Search, Social Media, Netflix, Cable/Broadcast in general, news outlets, Cable carriers, Academia yada yada.

The question will be perennially 'what to enforce and why' but we definitely already have standards.

Aside from fighting about the rules at various institutions, we then have 'legal' rules (a bit different), and of course we probably want to make sure there are at least some forums where anything can be said.

But there are not...

> The question will be perennially 'what to enforce and why' but we definitely already have standards.

Yes, but each of us has a different standards.

In usa for example, they have "the nipplegate" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XXXVIII_halftime_sh... where one nipple (a thing kids hang on for some time, then are disallowed to see for a few years, then want to hang on again,... and well, girls see in the mirror every day) causes such controversy...

...and in the country of my birth (yugoslavia), even in the "dark socialist times", you had nipples on public tv in a milk commercial - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYhaHhpLKag&t=21s

It's same with speech, you might agree with your own personal standards, but many others don't, some believe in absulute free speech, and some want to censor what they believe to be "hate speech".

This is again one of those things where people say that they agree to a standard of what is and what should not be free speech, but each has their own standard incompatible with the other ones.

Is posting an image part of your free speech? Absolutely yes.

Then let's see, when was the last time you were exposed to a child pornography image? Hopefully never (though we do have this whole pornhub drama going on).

It is obvious that there are ways of controlling speech and we do it all the time. I think only Americans believe in this absolute negative liberty view of speech.

Child pornography isn’t illegal because of the contents of the speech. It’s illegal because it’s an accessory to the original crime of child molestation. That is why the Supreme Court has consistently ruled that virtual child pornography, even photorealistic, is Constitutionally protected speech.

Okay but you're can surely realise that someone in possession of child pornography images that were taken, say, 20 years ago is no longer accessory to the original crime in any way. In fact, it might very well be possible for that person to not have even been born back then. Of course, that's not really how law works because some crimes don't have a deadline.

But whatever the legal reasoning behind it is, the consequence is that you are pretty much forbidden from distributing this material on the internet and so your right to show something to others is being restricted. I would consider that a limitation of free speech. But of course, I can totally see why you'd have the need to justify it in some other way, because we don't want our freedom of speech to be limited in any way. The law is always open to interpretation after all.

What's the reasoning behind restricting people from sharing copies of copyrighted material? Obviously it is also an illegal action. My point being, there are many ways in which our speech is monitored and restricted already.

> I think only Americans believe in this absolute negative liberty view of speech.

That's a wonderful compliment.

It's really not.

Some groups due to historical or biological reasons require special protection. It is why we protect kids, it is why we protect people with disabilities. But if you take negative liberty to its extreme this special treatment that we offer these groups of people become unwarranted privileges. A world view that is based entirely on negative liberty ends up in a "survival of the strongest" state.

Obviously there is a big discussion on which groups require what sort of positive reinforcement from society to be able to truly enjoy and perform as close to the rest as possible. One simple example is access to buildings for people in wheelchair. When the government requires businesses to put these they're infringing on the businesses liberties to decide how to, well, run their business. But I know very little people who wouldn't agree with this situation.

So, i don't know, I think a purist vision of the state as a non-interfering voice (negative liberty) has for a long while been deemed an inadequate way of structuring society. So I don't think it's a wonderful compliment.

I see it more as hubris then something beneficial. Any society that allows a man like Alex Jones to peddle what he peddles with just a light financial slap on the wrist isn’t a society I consider to be healthy or going in the right direction, even on principle. It creates a dog eat dog world and it doesn’t have to be that way.

Do you believe someone should be able to brigade 1,000 people to post slander and accusations across the internet such that you are fired and ostracized from society, and possibly investigated and bankrupted?

Speech is information, and in the information age there is a lot of speech that can rapidly be brought to bear on someone. We've already seen it happen with internet mobs and similar things.

What happens when someone weaponizes it? Because that's what is going on here, and to pretend it is simply like "speech" from the ages of horseback and paper, much like when "arms" were muskets, is naive from a policy standpoint.

So you agree that Alex Jones is deliberately spreading lies for personal profit, and that this is harmful, but believe there shouldn't be any laws against it or any punishment for the consequences? Does that include the judgement he's facing now?

Governments have been regulating speech since the beginning of governments. Every society doesn't exist in a state of maximal speech oppression as a result, so it cannot be the case that any attempt to regulate speech chills free speech in general.

>so it cannot be the case that any attempt to regulate speech chills free speech in general.

That does not follow. It only follows that it doesn't chill free speech maximally.

No, sorry. I don't mean to imply he shouldn't be penalized in this case. I'm talking about literally everything else he says that doesn't get prosecuted. For example, saying the election was stolen is perfectly legal even though it's a destructive lie. Without a plaintiff who can cite specific harm, there's no crime

> I fervently believe that there's no practical way for government to regulate speech so they shouldn't try.

> I don't mean to imply he shouldn't be penalized in this case.

Those two statements would seem to contradict each other. How can you believe that the government should not try to regulate speech, yet it should still be able to penalize someone for their speech?

Well stated.

There is practical and very much effective way: it is called propaganda: you don't need to regulate speech if you can control what people think (and national security, wokeism will take care of the rest).

Do you have evidence that he was caught out by the sending too much SMS data?

His own statement said the SMS data was from 2019, it was all messages from that year rather than the ones filtered by the relevant keywords.

The media reports did not have the same conclusion you are suggesting.

You should be especially concerned than. Listen to the closing argument from the plaintiff's attorney, what it is they are after.

https://twitter.com/Spiro_Ghost/status/1555690309077565440

And it's effectively is to silence Alex.

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