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Comment by whythre | Hacker News Reader

That is a lot of fancy words in favor of suppression.

I'm (still) strongly sympathetic to Baldwin's point of view, but the GP also has a valid point, in that liars have gained most of the benefit of the civil-libertarian point of view since the rise of the Internet. These days, a lie can literally travel around the world before the truth makes it out past the firewall.

There's a reason we divide history into the time before and after the invention of movable type made mass publication possible. We're living in a similar transitional era now, likely an even-more profound one. The resulting intellectual and political upheaval is so extensive that some things are going to have to change, including minds. Maybe even mine.

> I'm (still) strongly sympathetic to Baldwin's point of view, but the GP also has a valid point, in that liars have gained most of the benefit of the civil-libertarian point of view since the rise of the Internet. These days, a lie can literally travel around the world before the truth makes it out past the firewall.

That's largely made possible by censorship. When you counter such views in groups that support them, you are likely to be silenced without your knowledge. Social media sites have built a whole suite of tools to aid in the removal of such content [1], and such tools are available to people from all ideologies. You might think that evens things out, but the secretive nature of the tools means that only a handful of people, relatively speaking, know how it all works. That creates a new "us vs. them" mentality, and we need to find our way back to a concept of shared humanity.

> There's a reason we divide history into the time before and after the invention of movable type made mass publication possible. We're living in a similar transitional era now, likely an even-more profound one. The resulting intellectual and political upheaval is so extensive that some things are going to have to change, including minds. Maybe even mine.

Social media today, like the printing press in its infancy, is understood and managed by a small number of people. In that environment you can still take a principled stance to argue against censorship and for transparency.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reveddit/comments/sxpk15/fyi_my_tho...

what a world where someone thinks getting banned from facebook is oppression

Yes. Imagine complaining about not being able to sit at a particular lunch counter, or getting the seat on the bus you want. I mean, dude, there are other seats and better places to eat. Why are you eating at diners anyway?

We have always made a distinction between things that are not the fault of the individual (skin color, gender, ethnicity) and things that are (speech and actions). Which seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Religion (/dressed up ideologies)?

As usual, this stops the conversation cold, because it doesn't fit anyone's narrative. Free speech advocates want to claim that the marketplace of ideas will lead people to good ideas, while people for restricting speech want to claim that it's possible to restrict speech without going full-on totalitarian dystopia. The case of religion shows quite starkly that both narratives completely fail to describe a central example with great historical and current relevance.

Free speech is a good idea for game-theoretic reasons. That's it. Free speech lets people fight it out with only the occasional riot and attempted overthrow of the republic. That's better than the alternative.

This one is in flux, I suspect. In the past, people were born into their religion, and today, at least in the west, it is becoming more common for people to choose their religion. So I guess this is the exception that proves the rule.

When it's at the behest of government, there's a word for that.

What about being banned from the entire banking system?

It might not have happened yet, but I suspect we're heading in that direction. We've seen 'speech related' bans from Paypal and crowdfunding sites.

Paypal even deplatformed the (UK-based) Free Speech Union (although they reverted that decision after the backlash)

When people with the wrong opinions (on who knows what, frankly, the list keeps changing) get banned from banking systems the very same people will be in the thread defending the sanctions and censorship action.

“Just build your own bank.” “Just build your own currency.”

It's like the tech tree from the Civ games in reverse.

To develop 'Social Network' or 'Digital Currencies', you need 'Server Farm', 'Internet', and 'Power Grid', and to have those you need everything from 'Intercontintental Data Cables' to 'Semiconductor Manufacturing', and way back to extraction and refining of raw materials..

They do it to regular people every day, I was banned countless times from websites when I was a stupid kid, and more than a few times as an adult. No one cares until it happens to famous racists. I wonder why.

Those people are still allowed to protest and march through the town. What part of free speech says that private companies need to carry hate speech?

Where we pretend that groups like the ACLU didn't have to go to court for that, and that it's always allowed for everyone and it's never a huge problem.

The ACLU has backed a bit off of that since Charlottesville.

https://www.vox.com/2017/8/20/16167870/aclu-hate-speech-nazi...

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